by Martin Donoghoe, Nicholas Dom, Christine James, Stephen Jones, Jane Ribbens and Nigel South

How people respond to heroin at local level is of interest to all those concerned with the relationship between social policy and social action. First, from the point of view of social policy, drug problems generally and heroin-related problems specifically are seen as one arena in which policies of community care, self-help and parental responsibility are being tested out. Are such policies feasible, are they desirable, and how do they work in practice?

Second, from the broader point of view of an interest in how individuals and social groups first construct and then negotiate crises, the responses of family members and others at local level give us a rare glimpse of a private world of fears, guilt, horrors and personal struggles that only occasionally become publicly visible. This is the level of experience to which social policy ought to be attentive but all too often is not. Our interest in looking at this area is not a form of voyeurism, but an interest in the relationship between 'personal troubles' and 'public issues' (C. Wright Mills, 1970, p. 14).

Our material is drawn from two complementary studies carried out by researchers at the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence. Both studies reflect concerns peculiar to the time. One was concerned with the question of how family members (generally parents, and most commonly mothers) respond to their relatives' (generally their sons', less frequently their daughters') heroin use.1 From a social policy point of view, this study resonates closely with current concerns with `parental responsibility', whilst from a social science perspective it picks up themes around the family, sexual divisions and mothering that are increasingly receiving the attention previously denied them in the post-war. years. The second study was concerned with the question of how a variety of persons at local or neighbourhood level, including not only parents of users but other residents, voluntary workers and professionals, perceive the beginning of heroin problems in their localities — if indeed they do perceive such problems in their early stages.2

Taken together, the two studies give us a unique data set, covering private and public responses to heroin use. The presentation given here is of necessity very much an overview; we restrict ourselves to certain selected themes, and do not go into detail. Our purpose is to bring out some basic points, which we summarise here:

1. Disaster planning As with other social and health problems, it is difficult to identify realistic preventive tasks and preparations for coping before the problem manifests itself. Preparations can be attempted in advance of the problem, but enthusiasm, momentum and indeed funding may quickly flag as people tire of hearing the cry `wolf!'. Furthermore, in the absence of direct experience of responding to a problem locally, heightened levels of expectation may lead to unhelpful speculation and misinformation about the nature of drug problems. Lay people, professionals and police, for example, may develop quite strange expectations, as our initial case study shows. Other members of the community, including the majority of parents, seem to `switch off'. Until there really is an expansion of drug use locally, there may be little that can be done in the way of practical preparations. And if there is an increase in drug use, but in a social group other than that thought to be most `at risk', then the preparations may be quite inappropriate.

2. From disbelief to shock When drug use (and in particular, heroin use) does manifest itself within social networks — neighbourhoods, friendship groups, families — then one initial response of those non-users who care about the welfare of the new users is almost always one of shock. In the central section of this chapter, we describe the ways in which this shock manifests itself for many parents, and then go on to discuss the various ways in which 'the problem' becomes defined and worked through within the context of the immediate family and friends. The focus here is upon the mother's reactions and the ways in which she construes this problem in the context of child socialisation. The issues thrown into sharp relief by heroin and other drugs will be familiar to many mothers — coping with uncertainty, anger, guilt and exhaustion — but there seems to be something specific about drug problems that sharpens these feelings.

3. Resources available shape longer-term responses In the longer term, parents and other family members may try out a variety of ways of responding to a drug user in the family — or in some cases may stick with their first response. The strategies eventually settled upon depend not only on the parents' sense of right and wrong,3 but also on the practical, personal and community resources that they have at their disposal.

One of the most important resources that parents have at their disposal in the longer term is the network of neighbourhood and community contacts and relationships to which they have access (cf. Bulmer, 1986). Another resource is access to a range of services — statutory services (health, police, etc.), non-statutory services and, in the case of the better-off, private health and welfare facilities (such as private drug rehabilitation houses). The closing sections of this chapter describe how these resources (external to the family) are brought into play in a variety of ways depending upon the opportunities provided by a particular neighbourhood, its history (general and drug-specific) and the ability of social groups to draw upon these.

We begin, then, with a descriptive account of a community in which heroin is expected to surface at any time, but as yet, has apparently failed to do so.

A town lies in wait

Yuppiesdale is a small industrial town in rural East Anglia. It is a town preparing itself for a problem yet to manifest itself, for whereas at least one neighbouring town is known to have an escalating heroin problem, so far Yuppiesdale has apparently been passed by. Nevertheless certain sections of the community are already gearing themselves up for what they fear is the inevitable and probably imminent arrival of a heroin problem in the area.

The history of the town gives us little clue to explaining why it might be a 'late developer' in relation to heroin problems. During the 1960s its population increased threefold when the Council, concerned about the exodus of its young people, began to implement a Town Expansion Scheme in conjunction with the Greater London Council (GLC) rehousing people from London's East End. Today there is still a strong London connection, with those who are unable to find local employment commuting to the city. A legacy of this development is that, unlike many rural areas, Yuppiesdale now has a disproportionate number of People under 25 years old. Perhaps because of the way that it has developed, Yuppiesdale tends to be seen as the trouble-spot of the county and a town which perhaps has more in common with some urban areas than the rest of the surrounding area with its 'county' outlook. It may be this, coupled with its youthful population and London links that, in the eyes of observers, appears to make Yuppiesdale a likely candidate for a drug problem.

Despite its history, or perhaps because of it — it is essentially a town without noticeable extremes of rich and poor, very much a place of the 'middling' classes, aspiring working class and undistinguished lower-middle classes — the townspeople describe a strong sense of community and strong family and friendship networks through which local news travels. It is this that leads people to assert with some confidence that if Yuppiesdale already had a serious drug problem then they would know about it. Local parents seem concerned, but hardly agitated about drugs in general or heroin in particular, although there is concern about under-age drinking in the town. There are no local branches of national organisations concerned with drug abuse — the nearest branch of Families Anonymous (some thirty miles away) folded when the professionals worker who was running it moved away.

Evidence from official sources supports the popular view that the town does not have a serious drug problem — at least as far as heroin is concerned. In the past year, local police reported only two cases of arrest where drugs were involved — cannabis in both cases. Similarly, health workers report no evidence of heroin use, although there is some suggestion that amphetamine use (including injection) may be on the increase. There is only one notified heroin addict in the town, who is well known to all statutory sources and regarded as something of a curiosity. The town's only real experience of dealing with a drug problem was two years ago when glue-sniffing and solvent abuse became a visible problem and was accompanied by an increase in shoplifting. In this instance the town rallied to confront the problem. Members of the public were active in informing the police of glue-sniffing activity and local shopkeepers, encouraged by concerned professionals, responsed by restricting the sale of glue and some other sniffable products.

In this situation, where there is little direct experience of heroin and most people's knowledge about the drug is obtained at second hand, the media play a strong role in shaping local perceptions. While the national press and the government anti-heroin campaign have undoubtedly played a part in putting drugs on the agenda, the local press went one step further, declaring the town to be a site for major dealing in drugs: 'Drug Shock — Opium sold in town for £17 000'. This report concerned the supposed sale of 4½ ounces of opium on the streets of the town. The information, which was credited to the Drug Squad, was later denied and a disclaimer issued but by then the story was already the talk of the town. Indeed much of the rumour circulating around the town seemed to originate in remarks made by police officers. This seems also to have been the pattern in other areas before officers become familiar with drugs as a matter of routine police work, lacking in glamour; they subsequently mature into more diffident witnesses.

Reflecting the popular perception of drug problems being varieties of youth problems, the practical preparations for the anticipated arrival of heroin were largely initiated by the town's Youth Service. In 1985 Yuppiesdale's Youth Worker called a meeting on drugs, inviting representatives from local professional and community organisations with an interest in young people. At this meeting, an inter-agency group was formed, and began to meet regularly. Initially, members of the group saw their role as preparing and educating themselves for a problem that had not actually arrived. However, their contact with the Drug Squad suggested that the problem was already in Yuppiesdale. 'They told us that the real hard stuff is in Yuppiesdale now' reported a member of the group. This report, together with the nationale publicity about heroin and young people, encouraged the interagency group to set up a drop-in service to provide Samaritan-style advice and counselling to young drug users and their families. The main instigators of the service were the Youth Worker and a senior Clinical Medical Officer responsible for schools in the area. The Youth Worker, although unable to provide any concrete evidence for his concern, was aware that there was a lot of talk among young people about drugs and where you could get them. He saw the drop-in service as a preventive measure — if people were talking about it, then the next step might be doing it, and it was best to be prepared.

The proposal for a drop-in service was by no means universally supported. Both the education authority and the local-police attempted to block the idea because they were anxious that issues might be raised at a time when their own organisations were not geared up to respond. However, prestigious medical backing provided legitimation to what would otherwise have been a low status proposal (the Youth Service is not an object of awe for many other agencies). The Clinical Medical Officer, who had previously worked in an area with a high level of heroin use agreed to provide clinical back-up to the service. The interest of the Clinical Medical Officer was reinforced by developments within the health service at local and national levels. Regional and District Health Authority members reflected popular concern and anxieties generated by the media. These anxieties were articulated as 'there must be a problem, what are you going to do about it?' The Health Authority was also under some pressure (as were all other Authorities) from the DHSS, which had issued a Circular suggesting that services should be appropriate to local need but (at that time) gave little indication as to how the need might be assessed. Officers of the Authority were therefore somewhat in the dark about how to proceed when instructed to prepare a report on the drug scene in the district. The report, which was compiled in great haste (three weeks) suggested that although there was a drug problem it was perhaps not as great as some had feared. The report estimated that there could be 120— 175 heroin users in the District Health Authority, 15-20 of these being in Yuppiesdale. The figures for Yuppiesdale were generated purely on the basis of population figures and information from other areas, rather than from any direct evidence from the town itself. Other aspects of the 'evidence' presented in the report were based on speculation and hearsay. For example, a teacher estimated that 25 per cent of secondary-school pupils had used cannabis, and this seems to have been accepted in the report without any substantive evidence. Nevertheless, the report sufficed to reinforce perceptions of the need for a youth-orientated drug service in the town.

The drop-in advice and counselling centre was opened on youth club premises for a trial period of ten weeks from February 1986, staffed by a part-time youth worker. By the end of its trial period, the drop-in service had had eight callers, the majority of whom had not come out of concern about a drug problem. Even those who had presented themselves as drug users were more conterned with personal, family or employment problems. This disappointing (or reassuring) response dampened plans to set up a permanent provision of this kind, the instigators concluding that the town did not need this type of service at that particular moment. Evidently, whoever might have been using drugs in Yuppiesdale either did not have any problems relating to their use, or else did not find this particular service attractive.4

In spite of the limited catch of the drop-in centre, the town continued to be rife with speculation and rumour about places where drugs and drug users might be found. We interviewed a variety of professionals, voluntary workers and 'ordinary' lay people (adult and adolescent) and found that three elements recurred in the folk-knowledge of where the problem might be located: (i) the places where young people congregate, particularly the local motor-bike-shop-turned-cafe; (ii) public houses, numerous sources suggesting cannabis at least is freely available from a number of pubs in the town; (iii) the 'worst estate in town' — the assumption being that if there were a drugs scene anywhere then it would probably be there, because of the estate's general reputation.

In our interviews and group discussions, we found a good deal of misinformation about different types of drugs and the signs of drug use in all sections of the community, including amongst professionals. The topic of drugs and young people seemed to us to function as a bit of mildly arousing, commonsensical, disapproving, conversational tittle-tattle: 'Yes, well, they would, wouldn't they, young people today, and if they haven't yet, well I dare say that they will do soon, and then things will be very bad indeed!'

This representation of a problem — as something which is potentially devastating to young people and yet not dangerous at present because it is far away — describes the mood of parents and others in the community, not only in Yuppiesdale but also in other areas in Britain where the problem has yet to manifest itself. In the following section of this chapter, we describe how this brittle sense of security — safety in distance — can shatter. Friends, relatives, parents and especially mothers of those young people who are discovered to be using heroin, may be quite appalled.

Case study: a problem in the family

How can and do parents, in particular, respond when what seems to be a distant danger is found flourishing at home?

Parental responsibility and family self-help loom increasingly large in the rhetoric of social policy in the 1980s. Responding to drug problems is one area in which these ideas are deployed. But little is really known about what these ideas might mean in practice — other than that it is women who are the focus of both the ideology and practice of family self-help.5 In the following paragraphs we explore some of these issues, showing how parents generally, and mothers specifically, respond to a drug problem in the family in a variety of ways. Sometimes these responses involve adopting ready-made discourses on 'parents and drugs', and sometimes they involve drawing upon personal, cultural and neighbourhood resources to painstakingly construct their perspective on the problem. Many parents feel strongly that they have no relevant personal experience on which to draw when it comes to drugs. There may be a desire for someone to tell parents how and what to think about drugs, and how to find a way of placing these unfamiliar issues within a familiar framework. For many parents, therefore, the first move is not necessarily towards other parents, but towards state agencies and professionals who can, it is hoped, deal with the problem on their behalf.

If one wishes to expand the theme of parenting, then one can think of these as people who, sensing that they cannot cope, search out a secular father- or mother-figure to succour them. More brdkily, this pattern can be seen as one of 'clientisation' — both for the parents and for the child — and as a taking-up of state promises of welfare and law and order (Jagger, in preparation). Many parents who take this route, however, find themselves disappointed by what the state seems capable of delivering in practice, as the following case study, drawn from our research in 1985, shows.

Pauline and Colin

'Pauline' first became aware of her son's involvement with illegal drugs some three years before she found out he had progressed to heroin. Initially, on discovering Colin was using cannabis. Pauline's reaction was to ring the local Drug Squad, in an attempt to get them to take action against the pub which was well known locally as the source of supply of a wide range of drugs. When the Drug Squad failed to act she rang Scotland Yard. At this stage she also involved relatives, who had the reputation of being 'tough nuts' and were regarded with some esteem by her son. The relatives were invited to a family meeting and as Pauline put it, gave her son 'a good talking to'.

Later, as it became more and more apparent that Colin had a serious drug problem, Pauline sought 'softer' forms of outside help, initially contacting the Samaritans, but eventually finding her way to a parents' support group run by a local drug agency. Relieved of some of her initial fear and isolation, Pauline — thinking of a way of giving her son a new sense of pride and purpose — bought him a car. Shortly after, Colin wrecked the car. Pauline again turned to outside help and through her GP arranged to take her son to the Drug Dependency Unit (DDU).

The visit to the DDU resulted in Pauline adopting a strategy which up to this point she would have found unthinkable. DDU staff told her that, in order to be accepted as a patient of the clinic, Colin would need to have heroin in his body. This being the case, Pauline was told she had two choices. Either she could leave it to her son to obtain his heroin — stealing in order to obtain the necessary money — or Pauline could help him to obtain his regular supply. Fearing for her son's safety, Pauline not only provided the money to support his habit but also drove him to and from deals during the period he was awaiting acceptance by the clinic.

In the event, attendance at the clinic proved not to be the answer Pauline had hoped for; Colin continued to use heroin while receiving methadone on prescription. Feeling this was the last straw Pauline told him to leave the family home. He has never returned and although Pauline knows of his whereabouts she has had no further contact with him

The desire to impose control on the child by involving outside help from statutory agencies very often comes up against an apparent impossibility of eliminating drug use by direct surveillance, at least without some cooperation from the user him/herself. If the family cannot rely on such cooperation,there may be intense frustration with the user, which relates also to the different perspectives of the people involved:

they don't see what they're doing. We see, but they don't, so you have a particularly difficult situation.

Even when cooperation and communication occurs for a while, experiences of relapse and recurrent feelings of being let down by the user may lead parents to feel intense despair and hopelessness. In reaction, they may at times feel like rejecting the user.

As might be expected, the mother is likely to be the prime mover in developing strategies for responding to a drug-using son or daughter. Husbands and other children sometimes pull in the same direction as the mother, sometimes in different directions, and sometimes try to withdraw altogether. Mothers often describe fathers as unable to cope, or as having a limited repertoire of responses and this can put a strain on the relationship between the parents. This may be especially difficult if mothers see their responsibility for child-care as of primary importance. Those siblings who try to support the mother or both parents can get deeply involved in a variety of ways, some of which are regarded as helpful by one or both parents, and some not. The resulting conflicts and confusions can add considerably to the initial problem.

There are a number of ways in which one could describe the various ways in which parents develop their strategies; for ease of illustration, we have chosen to divide the remainder of this chapter into three main parts. In the first of these, we describe the general perspective and some of the strategies recommended by Families Anonymous, which has become an important source of knowledge, advice and personal support to those parents who identify themselves primarily as parents when constructing their responses to their drug-using sons and daughters.6 Subsequent sections will describe some patterns of response which are preMised upon parents positioning themselves as members of a local community in struggle, engaging in collective action to clear the problem out of their immediate environment; and as clients of the state, trying to give the problem to state agencies such as the police or the health service.

These accounts raise a number of social policy questions. For example, in responding to the issue within the family, are parents shouldering their responsibilities in the way that central government policies would advocate? In doing so, are they acting as an alternative or substitute for state action? Or do they see themselves as acting out of a sense of disillusionment with the services available from the state, whether doctors, police, or teachers? Are the models of family support and action which parents are developing ones that parents are inventing for themselves, or do they simply accord with central government views of family life? Is it parent power in alliance with the state, or in defiance of the state, or a series of accommodations and negotiations?

Parents drawing upon the resources of the 'parents movement'

Drug use, particularly drug use by young people, upsets a lot of people. It particularly upsets parents of the young people concerned. Starting, then, with those adults who position themselves primarily within a discourse on parental identity, responsibility and rights, we can ask — what does parenthood mean?

There is a growing but quite diverse literature on social reproduction and cultural reproduction, child socialisation and mothering,7 and some of this has been useful to us in thinking about the blow that drugs seems to inflict upon the practice of parenthood. Drawing upon this literature, we can say that, as parents in this culture, we expect to pass on a family name as well as various elements of our physical, social and personal characteristics. We may also self-consciously build up cultural and economic capital to pass on to our children — and we expect them to receive it happily and gratefully in whatever form it may be offered. For parents, then, there is an expectation of a line of continuity between themselves and their children. This quite basic, often implicit, expectation may be contradicted by a number of experiences among which, for whatever reasons, drug use (particularly heroin use) looms large.'8

How do these issues relate to parents' reactions to illeggl drug use by their children? Drug use by young people is felt by many parents to represent a severe form of discontinuity in the life of the child as they thought he/she would become, at times amounting to the death of the child. There are also real fears for children's physical safety. Parents may see the child as being locked in a process of self-destruction, or this perception may alternate with the feeling that it is the parent herself who is somehow destroying the child:

What I felt was, what can be the matter with me, what am I doing destroying my own children, the last thing I want to do and it's happening (mother).

Thus parents may feel that they have failed the child — 'where did I go wrong?' — at the same time as feeling that the child has betrayed the parent — 'why has he or she done this to me?'

For mothers, there is in addition the special significance of the mother—child relationship, which for some at least constitutes a core part of identity. Boulton (1983) has shown how women may enjoy motherhood for its immediate satisfactions, but may also gain an important long-term sense of meaningfulness, believing that whether or not their mothering seems to be valued in the present, it will be in the long term because of what or who the child will become when he/she grows into adulthood. Frustrations in the immediate experience of motherhood are made more tolerable because they can be set against a long-term perspective of the fruitfulness of mothering.

More generally, Hilary Graham has discussed the significance for women of acts of caring, a caring which Graham describes as a labour of love. In this, she is seeking to convey an understanding that the labour and the love which constitute caring are inextricably interlinked (Graham, 1983). Both sides of the equation — the labour that has gone into producing the son or the daughter, and the caring feelings that legitimise such work — are made a mockery of when parents come to regard the child as being a 'drug user'. The initial shock and sense of stigma may be followed by a period of grief and mourning at the loss of the child as they had envisaged he/she would become, together with fears for the imminent loss of the child in a tangible physical sense and recriminations against themselves and/or the child. When these initial reactions begin to be replaced by exploration of ways in which the parents might try to regain contact with the child and to find new ways of caring, there may be bewilderment as to how this should be expressed. What is the labour that is appropriate to this form of breakdown in family life?

One answer to these dilemmas is given by the loose association of parents' groups subscribing more or less directly to the ideology of Families Anonymous. In this case, the key idea is that care needs to be redirected from too tight a focus upon the child, to a revaluation of the parents themselves. This is an assemblage of ideas that can all too easily be interpreted as saying that there is nothing that parents can do to stop their children's drug use. It is in fact more complex than this, containing a number of elements that are not entirely mutually consistent, as we shall show. Some of the key ideas are as follows.9

Self-control In this approach the emphasis is upon controlling yourself rather than the user (or anyone else for that matter). It is rooted in a philosophy that suggests that we can only take charge of our own lives, and that this is where our responsibility lies. In addition, drugs problems are seen as constituting a 'family illness' that requires all members of the family to recognise the extent to which they collude in, and thus perpetuate, the pattern of misuse. Parents are advised to change their own behaviour and create space in which the user will have the opportunity to change him or herself. The correct parental response is one that is directed towards the parents' own recovery. If there are beneficial consequences for the user, then this is of course to be welcomed, but it is not the main aim of the strategy.

Tough love As a term, 'tough love' is widely used and indeed a number of different people claim to have originated it. In some respects it may perhaps be seen as contrasting with 'permissiveness':

If you're a soft touch you just add to the problem. You've got to bring discipline into your own life as a parent, and you've got to learn to love them.

Love and understanding do not entail acquiescence to whatever a child wants:

I'm going to stand here like a rock and not budge, and you can come back to me when you feel like it . . . That's real understanding . . . To say 'I really understand you, I don't mind what you do', that's not real understanding.

So part of the self-control entails the aim of ceasing to 'enable' the user. To this end parents refuse to collaborate in any actions that might make it easier for the young person to avoid the consequences of his/her drug use.10 Could this in a sense be a more subtle and indirect form of power — the power of inaction or withdrawal of labour?

Powerlessness Nevertheless, the third major strand of FA philosophy concerns the theme of powerlessness. Parents are asked to affirm not only that they are powerless over the lives of others but, also, that they are powerless over their own lives and should therefore seek the help of a higher power — however that is conceptualised. Nevertheless, as the theme of self-control suggests, this is not meant to lead to an abdication of responsibility by parents. Indeed, the major part of the programme of FA is concerned with parents' and others' responsibility to reassess and reconsider their own actions. But this responsibility can only be exercised by seeking the aid of a higher power:

You are powerless over drugs and other people's lives, which is a tremendous relief . . . It was out of my power. I was completely helpless, there was nothing I could do.

Such sentiments appear to have little in common with themes of parental authority and assertion, and may look ill-at-ease next to an approach of tough love. However, what this perhaps highlights is the indirect nature of the powerfulness of tough love. Powerlessness over others is expressed in a refusal to enable, and is thus transformed into the powerfulness of the refusal to act and to collaborate.

The practical responses developed by parents under the influence of FA may not always accord completely with their 'theoretical' rationales. For example, FA (and indeed many other groups and individuals) advocate a model of drug-use-as-anillness-, and the appropriate response to illness would normally be active caring. Yet FA also advocate a strategy of non-directiveness and self-control — not something which would normally be seen as an appropriate response to illness. Consider the following extract from a mother — not a member of FA but a subscriber to the general view that drug use is a kind of illness — which illustrates this:

There we were with sick children, but whereas when they were kids and they had measles or a cold or ear infection, you knew exactly what to do to help them through their illness, here we were faced with a sick child and [were] totally incapable of bringing them any help at all, other than by doing the naughty things we occasionally did — like buying them a bottle of codeine, or giving them an extra fiver, knowing damn well that extra fiver was to go on a fix.

In describing the ideology of any movement, including that still strengthening parents movement around drug problems, one should allow for some flexibility, hence apparent mismatch, between what is done and representations of it. It could even be argued that a totally consistent model might in fact not be the strongest one for coping with the contradictions and complexities that confront a family in crisis. This is partly because adoption of a strategy for responding to one's son's or daughter's drug use is not a once-and-for-all event, but an extended period of angst and struggle. Mothers and other relatives may find that their moods and responses chop and change abruptly at times; they may alternate and shift between different strategies, or use a combination of several.

Unless family members have some wider resources upon which to call — an ideology that revalues them themselves, a supportive set of relationships in the immediate community or neighbourhood, or access to services that make sense to them — they generally find it very difficult to surmount their difficulties. Having looked briefly at the first of these resources, as articulated by the British parents' movement around drugs, let us now look at one example of the second.

Public activism as a context for parental care

One of the resources available to parents is the example of what other parents can be seen doing in the public arena. In communities where the identification of a serious drug problem has promoted a variety of vigorous responses, family members' development of a strategy may be heavily influenced by what other local families seem to be doing — by what is popular.

`Tenantsrise'

This case study concerns a locality (or rather, a socially linked set of localities) in a large town in north-west England. Here local conditions have favoured a very rapid build-up of drug problems and an equally rapid and very public collective response. Let us begin by sketching in the background, and then describe how family members utilised existing forms of social organisation to mount their 'counter-attack'.

The Tenantsrise estates are located within a borough of mixed housing that has returned both Labour and Conservative councillors in the past. The working-class end of the borough in which the Tenantsrise estates are located strikes a contrast with the more affluent part, and this physical differentiation is matched in the minds of Tenantsrise residents by a sense of social identity emphasising the strong communal and collective aspects of working-class culture. The main focus of collective activity is the network of tenants associations in the area, around and out of which have arisen a number of community projects and groups, including networks that underpin the struggle against drugs. A majority of the activists are women, and this aspect marks a continuity with action within the family. But the form of their action — a good-humoured but combative series of autonomous actions and demands upon state agencies — provides quite a contrast with the depressive and privatised modes of coping that characterise parents responses to youthful drug use in some other areas of the country.

The built environment in Tenantsrise not only stimulated the main form of social organisation, tenants associations and their spin-offs, but also helps to explain the public nature of the heroin scene locally, and hence the public response. The estates generally conform to a pattern — rows of houses and maisonettes around parts of the perimeters, with a number of medium-rise and several high-rise blocks in the middle. The stairwells of the medium and high-rise blocks provide opportunities for groups to congregate out of the public gaze.

From 1985 heroin dealers and users became noticeable in first one and subsequently other parts of Tenantsrise; throughout that year the problem escalated in a very obvious way. Crowds of young people would congregate around the estates at set times, pick up one-dose 'bags' of heroin from small dealers ('with the stuff in shopping baskets!' as one tenant described) and then disperse to use the drug. Many of them, wishing to use the drug before their return home, entered the stairwells of the blocks and stayed for about half an hour, usually in groups of five to ten. This caused considerable upset and annoyance to residents — and to caretakers, who had to clear up afterwards. A group of caretakers — talking about the scene on one of the estates, from which heroin had largely moved on by 1986 — gave us this picture:

Well I happened to be working on the back stairs the next day and I noticed the stuff on the back stairs like.

Interviewer: What was that?

You get sick as well, vomit, cans of coke lying around, bars of chocolate, things like that. They don't eat the chocolate, they use the silver paper, and they throw the chocolate away and use the paper ['chasing the dragon', a method of smoking heroin].

Everybody knows the signs.

Oh, aye, yes.

Interviewer: Where do they get that knowledge from? Well, I mean — they. . . its obvious.

Interviewer: Its not obvious to everybody, you know.

Well no — it is in these flats, because if you see a group of fellows that don't live here and they are about 18 or 19 and are walking around in the lifts and are on the landings, its obvious what they are up to. . . we [caretakers] come up and down and say 'what are you doing here?' and they say `oh we were waiting for someone', that's the first thing they say to you. And you say, 'who?'. And they can't answer you, who the name is. 'Oh I'm waiting for Billy So-and-so'. And you say, 'well, he doesn't live on that floor'. And its bloody obvious. . . we have known right away.

Yes . . . you smell them . . . Its like a firework that has been let off . . . Silver paper and matchsticks, bars of chocolate, bottles of water. . . candle grease . . . saves using matches.

As seen by Tenantsrise residents, problems could be identified along several dimensions:

(a) The mess: no one liked the mixture of matches, foil, body fluids and so on that was left at the scene of intoxication.

(b) Fears: many residents, particularly pensioners, felt intimidated by the sheer presence of so many young people.

(c) Violence: in some cases, residents who protested directly to prospective users or to dealers were threatened in no uncertain terms. This shut some people up, but it made others angry enough to want to do something.

(d) Police inaction: police seemed reluctant to act on information received.

This matrix of problems, facing a group of people who had already developed a form of social organisation — tenants associations — drew a very rapid collective and public response. Meetings were called, local leaders emerged and were supported, a series of demands were made upon police, health and welfare agencies and the Council building department, and these demands were articulated publicly through local newspapers. Direct action also took place, involving confrontation between young people 'hanging around' and groups of residents. Some residents also engaged in quasi-vigilante activity such as congregating outside the houses of 'known dealers' to harangue them. Many of the residents involved simultaneously struggled with the problems posèd for them by their own son or daughter using heroin. As recounted to us, although this was a very resting period it had its positive side in drawing people together and stimulating a strong community feeling between families in their neighbourhoods.

At the time of writing (summer, 1986) clear achievements could- be identified by Tenantsrise residents. The publicity generated may initially have made the problem worse, by drawing in more petty dealers and prospective users from other areas; but the residents' shouting, haranguing and determined surveillance of 'their' estate, plus some police activity that they elicited, did help to 'move the problem on'. Their biggest success was undoubtedly to get the Council to knock down and rebuild parts of the estates that gave the greatest opportunities for drug use, and to carry out simple measures, such as the fitting of entry phones to other blocks. These were the sorts of improvements for which the tenants associations had been pressing for years, but it took the public scandal of drug use and the additional energies that this mobilised for them to be able to press the argument to a successful conclusion.

As rebuilding occurred and many tenants were relocated to other parts of the city, some initiated anti-drug action in their new communities, virtually none of which were free of heroin. These people formed a cadre of community activities and moral entrepreneurs, and currently constitute a force to be reckoned with. Their actions have not defeated the heroin problem in the city, indeed one might observe that availability and use has now become more generally dispersed over a broader area; the local police believe that this may be one of the consequences of vigorous action against low-level dealers. Nor have all the children of activists totally disengaged with heroin — some have, some have not, some are 'inside' (in prison) so no judgment can yet be made, and a small number have died. In the following case study we illustrate how this situation was expressed by one of the mothers whose children became involved with drugs.

A mother and an activist

For 'Maggie' and her family, the pattern of discovery and response embraced a more diverse and upsetting range of crises and confrontations than many parents have to face. Their experiences have had an influence on the ways in which other local families have coped with a drug-using teenager, yet ironically it was because of the earlier growth of a spirit of neighbourhood vigilance that the son of the family first 'got into trouble'. Local drug dealing had reached a scale where old people were scared to go out and parents were extremely worried about their young children getting involved. Calls for police action followed. Having had no idea of her son's activities, it was a great shock to Maggie when the police arrived on her doorstep saying that they had arrested her son Michael and his girlfriend for possession of as yet unidentified drugs. They had been called in by a neighbour who did not realise the young man was Maggie's son.

When the drug was analysed it was found to be a mixture of heroin, talcum power and gravy powder. Being told that this was an extremely dangerous mixture, perhaps potentially lethal,' upset and angered Maggie. As the incident was already public and in the hands of the police she thought that Michael's stupidity deserved to be punished: 'I said, you can keep him; anyway he went to court and got fined. I made him pay it for himself because he was working.' After what the family hoped would be a lesson to Michael, Maggie asked him why he had become involved with heroin. She and her husband had provided a good home and what Michael was doing made 'no sense'. Michael explained it as 'going along with the boys' and got very upset.

As in other families, Maggie's responses developed from the initially guilty reaction of asking 'where did we go wrong?', to trying to keep an eye on Michael and get him to drop the tad company' with whom he was associating — in particular his girlfriend Sue. But Maggie's strategy for dealing with her son's heroin problem also took seriously the question of where he was getting the drug itself. She took the issue outside her own home and family, discussing it with neighbours, raising the issue with the Council and vocally demanding that action be taken against 'the pushers'. Her public remonstrations did not stop Michael or his friends using drugs, but it did have an impact on them — making them think about what they were doing.

Maggie's next move was to try to develop better cooperation and coordination between parents in the same situation as herself. While continuing to keep an eye on Michael within the family, and encouraging a 'stable' life-style by ensuring that he kept going to work, Maggie teamed up with other mothers with drug-using Sbns and formed a Family Support Group. The group grew quite quickly and helped to mobilise tenants' action against local dealers, as well as agitation about broader environmental problems such as housing decay and poor sanitation. The group also helped Maggie's family and others to translate the initial reaction of trying to cope with a drugs problem solely within the family, into a cooperative effort which embraced a form of treatment for the young users which all the parents approved. An acupuncture clinic, based in the centre of town, had offered its services to the parents. Maggie's group organised themselves to overcome the major difficulty that might prevent the young people from going to the clinic, distance, and borrowed a mini-bus to take the kids to the clinic, working a rota to sit with them during their treatment and to make sure that they got back home all right without straying.

Unfortunately, despite all this activity at the level of both the family and the community, Maggie's own story did not quickly move towards a happy ending, since Michael was arrested for a minor (non-drug) offence and sent to prison. She believes that the strategy that she and other local parents worked out does seem to be having some effect on local users and dealers and her optimism for the future is based on this and on the feeling she gets from Michael's letters from prison that 'things will be different now'.

This sketch of an 'activist' points up the importance of having support from a wider network of friends and neighbours close at hand — a network which can not only give aid in relation to care and control of the child, but also funnel some of the parents' anxieties, energies and hopes outward into broader, often more manageable and rewarding activities.

What the stories of Maggie and of other Tenantsrise parents represent, then, is not a victory over the heroin trade, but a public and full-hearted engagement with its local manifestations. Local community organisations have been able to force certain accommodations both upon state agencies (housing, police) and upon drug dealers and users. Their public action, drawing upon existing collectivist traditions and organisational forms, contrasts quite sharply with responses in other areas, which were often state-led, privatised, and low key. It is to two such cases that we now turn, before rounding off the chapter with a description of the intermediate possibility of state—parents cooperation (and the contradictions and conflicts that this can provoke).

State and professional initiatives

In these paragraphs we describe two settings in which state' and professional initiatives in relation to drug problems, rather than parental or other lay activism, is the dominant feature. In the Marginsville case study, state agencies and their professional staff seem to have retained 'possession' of the issue, largely because of lack of parental or other lay organisations that might have laid claims. In the second case, Helpsbo rough, by contrast, the agendas of parents and professionals have begun to diverge. In neither case are the parents the prime movers (as in Tenantsrise or — to give a different etample — in parts of the USA, Linblad, 1983).

Marginsville

Marginsville is an overspill area on the edge of a town on the south coast of England. Here, state services for drug users are relatively well developed, and community responses undeveloped. This balance of responses reflects a relatively long history of health services responses to drug problems in the general area, and a lack of community organisation onto which a 'popular' response to drug problems could be grafted.

Demographically, the area of coast in which Marginsville nestles is marked by a relatively large retired population, attracted by the facilities of the area, reasonable climate and reputation as a respectable location for respectable folk. Interspersed with the retired are other populations connected to the industrial base of the area (holding up relatively well), the service sector (enlarged by leisure and communications), professionals and a student population. The result is a relatively heterogeneous set of social grotips, but little general sense of 'community' as an actively integrating and energising process. Hence there is little of an established framework of community linkages in which a lay public response to drug problems might readily lodge.

As far as the state's response to drug problems is concerned, things-are relatively well developed. The geographical situation of the surrounding area and the good links with continental ports may have contributed to the development of a small-scale drug importation and dealing scene (locally, and as a part of the London-focused trade) from the 1960s onwards. A Drug Dependency Clinic was established in 1968 and since that time a framework of services, involving both statutory and non-statutory sectors, has evolved. The general impression obtained from people whom we interviewed in the statutory and non-statutory sectors was that a coordinated response was in place and functioning tolerably well. However, this response was a bureaucratised rather than popular one, and the involvement of ordinary members of the community was relatively low, being restricted to the attendance of a small number of parents at support groups organised by professionals in a neighbouring town.

Interviews carried out with tenants, caretakers and shopkeepers in Marginsville confirm this picture. Whilst there is drug use, including heroin use in the locality — a fact confirmed by a GP, drug advice workers, probation officers with clients resident in the area, police, probation and some residents — most of this use is relatively discrete and privatised, taking place not in large publicly visible groups but in the homes of individuals. In some cases, individuals resident on the estate go into the centre of the town to obtain drugs, certain pubs being known as places of supply. A pub on the outskirts of the research area had become quite widely known as a place for dealing in stolen goods and illegal drugs (other than heroin), and this notoriety led to it being closed. But generally speaking drug users do not usually congregate publicly in large groups or in ways that might identify them as users (in distinct contrast to users in Tenantsrise).12 Perhaps there is a feature of the drug distribution system in this region of the country that reduces dealing of drugs to younger adolescents, and hence reduces the likelihood of public displays that might stimulate a higher level of community response. But, as we have indicated, the relatively heterogeneous population and lack of extensive social ties outside the family may also contribute, as may the relatively highly developed system of statutory and non-statutory specialist services. These features of the area, its history and present development combine to create a situation in which it is the state, rather than any 'community', that leads local policy on drug problems.

Helpsborough

Our final case study is set in a borough on the western outskirts of London, where the presence of a statutory agency has provided the focus for a community response by parents and relatives of drug users. Previously we noted that Marginsville's response to local drug problems is dominated by the statutory and non-statutory services and that of Tenantsrise has been by lay community action. In Helpsborough however we find a more mixed situation, where lay and professional interests are still being played out and have yet to be reconciled. But before we look at the nature of this uneasy alliance we take a brief look at the setting.

The borough has a long history of heroin use. It is claimed that the seeds of the problems were sown by a local GP who started treating drug users, privately prescribing opioids. Some say that his action helped to make an existing, although relatively small problem, much worse. Others argue that he merely served to highlight the real situation — one where heroin use was already extensive but not recognised by service providers. The failure of the statutory services to respond to the problem is still reflected today in the lack of local provision for drug users. At present those wanting treatment face long delays for appointments and a 15-mile trek to the nearest Drug Dependency Unit.

Nevertheless in 1984 the availability of government funding, together with the borough's reputation as a problem area in relation to drugs, led to the setting-up of a specialist drug agency under the auspices of the Youth and Community Service. Reflecting its position within the Education Service, the role given to the new agency was one of education and prevention; its staff, who were all from a youth-work background, have no brief to work with the large number of adult drug users still to be found in the borough. In practice the workers found this situation fraught with conflict, finding it impossible to ignore the needs of drug users, especially when the possibilities for referral elsewhere were limited. Within a short time workers found themselves with two jobs — their official job and another that was being carried out in their own time. It was in the context of this unsatisfactory state -of affairs that the idea for a separate, independent organisation arose, and in Spring 1986 a local branch of Aid for Addicts and Families (ADFAM) was formed. The new organisation was mainly based on an existing relatives' support group run by the statutory drug agency. Although it was clearly professionals who provided the initial impetus, the relatives were quick to take up the idea. Many had had personal experience of the difficulties involved in trying to get help for a drug-using member of their own family and, having gained confidence from the support group, were willing to try to do something to improve the situation.

In retrospect it is clear that both between professional and lay members and among lay members themselves there was little consensus about what the new group should be doing. The professional workers (the staff of the drug agency) saw the group as a source of personal support and as a pool of volunteers to offer help with befriending, transport, fund-raising and other activities which they were unable to carry out, either because of their position as council employees or simply through lack of time. The workers' expectations of the group therefore might be most accurately described as something akin to a 'league of friends', a situation in which lay members support the work of the professional staff, the direction of activities being determined by the latter.

The lay members, however, had other ideas. Perhaps because of their social class background (the group was largely drawn from the working-class end of the borough), lay members did not easily align themselves with middle-class notions of volunteering. Many felt that the new organisation should take on an active campaigning role. In particular they felt that efforts should be directed towards establishing a new Day Centre which would offer help to those wanting to come off drugs and continuing support to those who had already undergone treatment. Like the professional workers, they believed that while there were still so many long-term users around who needed to deal in order to support their habit, it was inevitable that young people would be drawn into drug misuse, despite an active prevention programme. Also, some parents, weary of the task of dealing with their (ex-) drug-using relative, saw the prospect of a Day Centre as a source of help for themselves and a more concrete solution to their problems than the once-a-week relatives' support group offejed by the statutory agency.

However, even amongst the lay members, there were disagreements. Some felt that the task of setting up services for users was too big to take on and that relatives, rather than users, should be the focus of attention. In this case the objective was seen in terms of setting up a telephone line offering twenty:four hour advice and support to parents and other relatives. At the time of writing, the group was still divided and some members, frustrated by the lack of progress were talking about forming a breakaway group.

For the professional staff, the nature of their relationship with the lay community has been thrown into question by these unexpected developments. Despite its own internal disarray, the 'support group' has distanced itself from its instigators and gone its own way — almost like some wilful adolescent. Far from being a source of unproblematic support, the group now threatens to pursue objectives which, in the eyes of professionals, are at best unnecessary and at worst positively harmful. A Day Centre, which enables addicts and ex-addicts to socialise is not, they argue, the solution to the problem but the way to create a new one.

Conclusion

The relationship between families and the state has been a crucial issue in social policy since the nineteenth century, and the question of drug abuse by young people has edged this relationship further into the spotlight. We are not in a position to develop any general theory of the relationship between family members and the state. Theories extant include that of Donzelot (women family members in alliance with state agencies, to the detriment of the family); those of the radical-feminists such as Firestone (male oppression of women being conducted through both state and family) and, rather differently, Delphy (married women having class interests opposed to those of husbands because their household work is given free); of socialist-feminists (women's work in the home cheapening the cost to capital and/or the state of reproduction of the labour force); and of Parsons (the family functioning to reproduce the social structure)." Although these accounts cannot be reconciled into one perspective, each contains provocative insights that articulate the concerns and experiences of certain social groups. There is, therefore, no general theory of state and family that can be regarded as generally accepted at the present time. Indeed, we doubt that any discourse on state and family could ever amount to a general theory, however compelling it might appear at certain times (Foucault, 1980).

Social policy issues arising from parental and community responses to drug problems must be seen in terms of a meeting of discourses, none of which is hegemonic. From the perspective of the state, as articulated by the present administration, the issue is one of 'parental responsibility'. This perspective has informed the recent development of policy in the fields of crime control, education, social welfare and health care generally. Parental responsibility in relation to youthful drug use is seen as a specific instance of the more general theme — supporting a particular version of the family, reducing demands on state services, and reducing inefficiencies and immoralities at community level by encouragement of forms of self-reliance that stay within the law.

At the same time, however, the Conservative administration came to power on a political programme that gained part of its popularity by pointing up a breakdown in law and order and by drawing attention to threats to the person and property posed by delinquents and criminals. This tendency to `stir the pot' of public anxieties in relation to criminality and disorder finds a reflection in government announcements on the drug problem, with repeated assurances that we are in imminent danger of being swamped by cocaine imports (heroin being by now more familiar, if not exactly cosy, in the eyes of the British public), drug suppliers and traffickers being described as serious criminals akin to terrorists, and drug users being portrayed (for example in the England and Wales 1985/6 and 1986/7 anti-heroin campaigns) as helpless victims, reduced to moronic social garbage. One can ask whether this recent tendency to `talk up' the seriousness of the problem is compatible with the longer-term policy commitment to encourage people to feel that they can cope and can 'take responsibility' for the problem. Although discourses on parental responsibility are very much to the fore, their own manifest contradictions restrict their power to capture and assimilate the thinking of all social groups — each of which brings forward its own concerns. It seems reasonable, therefore, to expect there to be a variety of popular 'readings' of the government's intentions and also a variety of responses.

This is what we found in our research. From the perspectiVe of lay people — parents and other relatives of users, friends and neighbours, their contacts in the lay community and with helping agencies — the government's intention is only one of the factors to be taken into consideration when trying to work out how to respond to drugs at a local level. As indicated in preceding sections of this chapter, parents and others have a variety of resources available to them, depending upon their economic and social position, demographic and cultural features of their locality, family structure and dynamics, personal experience and so on.

What does this imply, as far as the practitioner, citizen or policy-maker is concerned? Simply that any individual, group or agency wishing to understand or to make an intervention into drug-related problems at local level needs to be alert to a range of related issues — personal resources (including gender and motherhood) of individuals; family structure and resources (including access to services); features of the local community (especially the extent to which there are active non-drugs networks onto which drug-related activities can be mapped); history and current organisation of state services at the local level, and inputs from the national context; and the ways in which these are worked through. If this seems to make things more complicated than expected for the practitioner, planner or policy analyst who seeks a clear statement about the national patterns of parental and community response to drug problems, then we can only reply that their expectations were unrealistic. Family and community responses to heroin and other drugs are like most things in life — complicated.

Notes

1. 'Parental and community responses project' carried out by ISDD with funding from a charitable trust. The project resulted in a book for'parents, reflecting their concerns in their own words: Coping with a Nightmare. For publication details please contact the Publications Unit, ISDD, 1-4 Hatton Place, London EC1N 8ND.

2. 'Identifying neighbourhood heroin problems', a project carried out for the Department of Health and Social Security. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Department for this project. Please contact ISDD for publication details of report, The Limits of Informal Surveillance.

3. It may seem unprofessional of us to use such terms as 'right' and 'wrong', but such terms do reflect something of importance to our respondents, and something that is not adequately captured by lukewarm concepts such as values or beliefs.

4. In the event, our own research indicated that heroin was indeed to be found in Yuppiesdale. Independent lay sources told us that people on several of the estates had some experience of use of the drug, and that one medium-sized dealer was well established in the summer of 1986. The lowest estimation of numbers of users was around ten, and one respondent suggested that around fifty users were being directly or indirectly supplied by the one dealer and as many people again having some experience of use of the drug. The types of persons said to be involved were primarily young middle-class adults — 'yuppies'. However, all our attempts to meet directly with these hidden users were rebuffed, our go-betweens indicating that their contacts saw no advantage and quite some risk in such contact with outsiders. We cannot therefore be sure of our facts in this case. But it is a salutary thought that whilst the focus of professional concern and development of services was orientated to potential teenage users, a quite different social group has been at play.

5. Self-help in relation to sexual divisions has been discussed by several authors. See, for example, Finch and Groves (eds) 1983.

6. There are a number of other groups besides Families Anonymous (FA) active in relation to drugs, including OPUS (Organisation of Parents Under Stress) and ADFAM (Aid for Addicts and Families). The focus here on FA is in no way intended as depricatory of these other groups.

7. Some examples are: Aberle and Naegele (1968); Backett (1982); Badinter (1981); Boulton (1983); Bourdieu and Passeron (1977); Delphy and Leonard (1986); Graham (1983 and 1984); Kohn (1971).

8. Exactly why drug use and particularly heroin use functions as such an effective 'interrupt& in family life is a complex question not addressed in this chapter. We do not feel that it is sufficient to make reference to 'moral panics' or to any other explanation which assumes that individuals and social groups assimilate any way of thinking and feeling offered to them through the media and other channels. The question must be posed — why is it that certain panics and pleasures are so popular with certain constituencies? Obviously, the contemporary practice of parenthood has its vulnerabilities (a series of accidents waiting to happen, some might say) but why is it that these are no neatly targeted by drugs/heroin? To say that the reason is simply that drugs are so horrendous circumvents the question.

9. This description of the strategies of Families Anonymous represents our own interpretation, and is based on written material produced by FA, such as 'The Twelve Steps', and also on interviews with members of FA groups, obtained as part of the Parental and Community Responses project.

10. See Bill, 1980.

11. In fact, such mixtures of powers are likely to cause considerable problems if injected, but if heated on foil then of course, only the volatile constituents would be ingested.

12. We found one exception to this general rule, as described by a caretaker of a block of flats in Marginsville. Referring to a single woman and two males living in a flat, the caretaker gave his opinion that 'she was definitely pushing. A stream of different kids going up there to the flat. You wouldn't get that many kids going to one flat for nothing.'

13. See Donzelot (1980); Firestone (1979); Delphy (1977); Seccombe (1974); Parsons (1954).