Drug recovery work, Plymouth

Team spirit: Hamoaze house users have used the NDC-funded astro pitch to play in football tournaments with staff, police and residents.

ANDY, born and bred in Plymouth, was a heroin user from 18 and is now at 42 a regular attender at Hamoaze House. 'Here we feel like we're a family looking out for one another, helping each other recover. When local people were against this project they probably feared that we would all be dealers and so on, but then they saw that we were coming here to get off drugs, not to spread them.' As Hamoaze House's chief executive Roma French explains, 'users here are stabilised on prescription or coming off drug use, not people who are out of their heads'.

The centre has a much wider impact than its drug recovery work. Many local families' lives have been severely affected by drug and alcohol. Children in these families have often had problems with anti-social behaviour, disrupting their education and that of their classmates. And drug dependency has also increased crime.

'Six years ago we all went mad when we read in the local paper that there would be a drug centre coming here,' says Lynne Bell, a Devonport resident who is now employed by the local New Deal for Communities [NDC] team as cultural development officer. 'We made protest banners and marched against it. Yet today 99% of residents who were on that march completely support the work of Hamoaze House.

'It has had a huge impact helping us deal with problems that we perhaps didn't face up to before as a community. I for one just didn't realise that many of my neighbours had issues like this in their families.'

Bell, who has also worked in security (a former store detective), says that many of the people she once detected for shop lifting are now using the facilities at Hamoaze House: 'Shoplifting is the normal way for drug and alcohol users to finance their habit here, we have found. When I was a store detective I just felt I was nicking the scrudge. Now I can see that these are real people with real lives who have an impact on others around them. They are people who need help to stop doing this, not just punishment.'

Devonport, the part of Plymouth where the NDC is based, has had a major problem with heroin for some years but also with crack more recently. Hamoaze House helps people get off their habits, offering a carrot that complements the stick of the extra police sergeant and eight PCs paid for in the NDC area by NDC (whose costs are gradually being absorbed by Devon and Cornwall Police).