Pills, Powder, and Smoke by Antony Loewenstein

Author:Antony Loewenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000, POL000000, LAW118000, SOC002010, POL029000, POL035000, POL028000, SEL013000, POL040020, SOC004000, LAW051000, TRU003000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2019-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Britain

‘They’re [Washington] making the rules, and we’re [Britain] the children doing as we’re told. For a country which has spent hundreds of years developing an empire, we should have realised that we’d be sleepwalking into moral imperialism. The collective and political judgement which is our drug policy is not British at all. It’s a successful invasion by American thoughts and ideals. That special relationship is not equal.’

FORMER BRITISH UNDERCOVER POLICEMAN NEIL WOODS1

Donna Marie had lived her entire life in the same council estate in Newcastle in north-east Britain. Centred around a grassy square, four-storey flats had been her surroundings as a child and adult. Her parents lived a few doors down from her own place. Her son, Grayson, had been taken away by social services due to her drug use. She had a few more months to prove that she was free from drugs; otherwise, he would be placed in permanent foster care.

Donna, 31 years old and wearing fluffy white slippers, black jeans, and a black top, was jittery when I met her in her apartment, and the conversation quickly turned to matters of life and death.

‘I stabbed a man in the face under the influence of alcohol, Valium, and [psychoactive drug] benzos’, she told me. He survived, and soon after her release from prison in 2014 she fell pregnant after a brief affair. She had thought she was infertile due to sexual abuse as a child, and had initially planned to have an abortion, but her parents convinced her to keep the baby. ‘This may be the one chance you’ll ever get’, they said. Grayson was born in July 2015.

Donna’s apartment was spotless, with photos of her son and father displayed prominently. With chipped red paint on her entry steps, and a tidy green lawn outside her flat, Donna gave the impression that she was trying to manage her chaotic life. While sitting down, walking around, and constantly licking and playing with her lips, Donna was clearly anxious, and cried when imagining losing her child.

She explained the abuse that she had suffered as a child from her father, mother, and sister. Her father was a football hooligan who viciously beat her mother, and her brother followed in his father’s footsteps. She was sexually assaulted in a flat in the council estate when a drug- and drink-addled man brutally used a hammer to attack her, injuring her vagina and anus. She said that these reasons were probably why she started using heroin. Her life was defined by struggle, boredom, and drugs.

She stayed off drugs during the bulk of her pregnancy. ‘I ate healthy’, she said. ‘The only thing I didn’t do was stop smoking cigarettes. I decorated my full house, everything. I was doing absolutely brilliant. It was the best time of my life. Then I hit eight months pregnant, I started getting in with the wrong crowd, and this other girl was pregnant. She was only six months pregnant and I was eight, she was taking heroin, and I ended up taking some Valium again and benzos.

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