Meet Steve: The crusader who really knows how to fight drugs

STEVE Hamer wasn't at home the day the letter marked "From the Office of the Prime Minister" dropped through his letterbox.

Naturally, his children were desperate to find out what was in it. Steve, the 52-year-old boss of the York-based Compass drugs resource scheme, had met with ministers and even the Prime Minister in the past to advise on drugs policy. But he had never had a letter from the PM addressed to him at home.

It was, of course, the letter asking whether he would accept the award of an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

Steve opened it when he got back. "To say my jaw dropped, hit the floor and bounced back would be an exaggeration," he says cheerfully. "But I was stunned." And pleased? "Absolutely overwhelmed."

It is traditional at such times to say your award doesn't belong to you alone. Steve particularly recognises the work of former Compass chairman George Wood - but also of all the other staff who have worked with him in the almost 20 years since he launched the scheme in York.

What he is probably most pleased about, however, is the profile the award gives to the work to which he has dedicated his life.

Drugs use, and the problems associated with it, has escalated hugely in this country during the past 20 years, Steve says. In his first year with Compass in 1986, he worked with about 50 users in the York area. Now, in York, the organisation he started deals with anything from 1,500 to 2,000 users a year.

It's an escalation mirrored across the country - one caused partly by the increasing availability of cheap drugs but also, he believes, by our impatient, have-it-all, instant-fix society. If anything can give you what you want right now, he says, it is drugs.

Whatever the reasons for the increase, the consequences of not dealing properly with drugs misuse are potentially huge.

Crime, anti-social behaviour, health problems and family breakdown can all be connected to drugs use. Dealing properly with the drugs issue is, therefore, a matter of public safety.

So while the health and well-being of individual drug users matters for those working with Compass, that is not the prime reason the organisation exists. It wants to help make society a better, safer place, says Steve. "If we put the individual drug user before public safety, then we would not be doing the right job."

Helping users helps society too. It is not an easy job, however. Steve knows all about the glamour and seductiveness of drugs. As a young working class man brought up in the Portobello Road area of West London, he experimented with drugs such as cannabis, LSD, heroine and cocaine. He quickly came to realise drugs weren't for him.

Yes, you can get a great, instant high, he says - but those highs are more than counteracted by the "pain and loss and suffering".

For some, the ability to retreat into an instant high makes up for that. For him, the artificial high of a drugs rush could never compare to the highs he could get out of real life. Perhaps it was his Catholic upbringing, but for him the highs he could get out of everyday life "were 20 times better, because I had to actually work to get them".

Nevertheless, he understands the appeal of drugs - which makes him able to work constructively with users in a way the 'just say no' brigade will never be able to.

Moralising doesn't work when it comes to dealing with drugs, Steve says.

He recalls a poster campaign from the early 1980s. It featured a ragged, haggard man who was supposed to serve as a warning about the consequences of drug addiction. Instead - at least so the story goes - the man became a pin-up for teenage girls everywhere.

It's hard to imagine a campaign backfiring more spectacularly - become an addict and you'll have teenage girls drooling all over you. What a deterrent.

Clearly, a different approach was needed.

Compass grew out of a national drive to get to grips with what the media in the mid-1980s described as the "heroin epidemic sweeping the country". Local health authorities were instructed to investigate the extent of the problem in their area, and develop a strategy to deal with it. Compass was the result.

By the time he arrived in York in 1986 to set up the organisation with the help of a £15,000 one-year grant from the district health authority, Steve already had a track record in the drugs field.

He had originally intended to be an art teacher but found, while doing his teacher training course in London, that it wasn't for him.

When he graduated, instead of teaching he became a volunteer with a London housing association delivering short-stay emergency accommodation for single, homeless people.

That brought him into contact with drug users - and from there he progressed to a paid job working with a residential drugs programme in Surrey.

Nobody really knew what they were doing back then, he admits. There were plenty of good ideas and good intentions, but no established model for dealing with problem drug users.

He was thrown in at the deep end, expected to live at the residential centre he worked at along with the users who were his clients. He had to earn their respect the hard way - confronting and challenging them and himself through a gruelling programme of workshops and counselling.

It was there he learned how to break through the 'impenetrable front' that many drug users put on, by "constantly challenging them until one got through to what one recognised as the essence of the truth".

After a couple of years, he had a change of direction and went off to teach in Sudan for two years. Back in the UK, he returned to drugs work - this time working with users in prison.

Then came the move to York in 1986.

He set up Compass in an old cocoa warehouse in Skeldergate. At first he was the only employee. But within a few months he had successfully applied for a £45,000 grant to cover three years, and was able to take on another full-time drugs worker.

Building up the Compass client base was slow work at first. He and his colleague could offer real help in terms of accommodation and referral to health care. "But people had no reason to trust us," he says.

Gradually, that changed. Compass began working with prisoners - and when they came out of jail, they were able to spread the word to the drug-using community. "They said we were pretty good, that we could help people and people could trust us," Steve says.

He also worked with GPs in the city, so that within 18 months of Compass being set up the number prepared to treat addicts had expanded from just one to 30.

The real breakthrough came in 1987, however, with the launch of the needle exchange scheme.

That was in response to the threat of HIV/ Aids. It was, Steve says, a massive public health issue - for the simple reason that drug users don't only have sex with other drug users. If HIV were to be passed on by the sharing of dirty needles, therefore, it could soon be passed on to the rest of the population too.

By recognising this early, Steve says, the Government helped avert a potential explosion of HIV/ Aids cases. "It saved us!" he says.

York wasn't one of the original pilot areas chosen by the Government for a needle exchange, but Steve managed to talk the district health authority into stumping up £1,000 for a local exchange. It transformed the work Compass was able to do.

Within a year, the number of users the York scheme had contact with leapt from 50 to nearer 300 a year. Initially, they came only to pick up clean needles: but Compass staff were able to chat to them and give advice about hygiene, diet, and the importance of not sharing needles. "And we could casually ask "how are you, is everything OK?" Steve says. "If they said something like 'I've been arrested', we could say 'we will help you!'

"We were able to use the needle exchange to draw them into treatment - and it worked."

From 1987 to 1984, Compass expanded the service it was able to offer to include advice and counselling; a community prescribing team; a life-skills education programme to help users find accommodation, jobs, and proper housing; and a prisons team.

The organisation expanded geographically, too - to Hull, the Midlands, Milton Keynes. By this year, it had programmes across much of England and was the largest provider in the country of services to drug users in prisons. The organisation had a turnover of £10.5 million and employed 350 people.

Compass lost its prisons contract this year. "We were not the cheapest and got bounced out," Steve says with a trace of anger. But the organisation still employs 200 people with a turnover of £6 million. Not bad for an outfit that began with one man in a former cocoa works, operating on a one-year-only grant of £15,000.

Most importantly, by attempting to tackle the growing problems caused by drugs misuse, Compass is helping all of us. The chief executive deserves his OBE.

Updated: 10:07 Wednesday, June 15, 2005