Pubdate: Sat, 16 Dec 2006 Source: Guardian, The (UK) Copyright: 2006 Guardian Newspapers Limited Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175 Author: Esther Addley Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine) ADDICTION THAT DROVE VICTIMS TO LIFE ON THE STREET A Desperate Craving For Heroin Or Crack Drove All Five Victims To Sell Sex. Stacey Rolfe is resolved to remember the good times with her friend Netty, when she lived across the road from her and they would have waterfights in the garden with her daughter and her friend's little boy. Or the times when they were at beauty college together, and Netty would lend Stacey clothes and do her eyebrows and makeup before they all went clubbing in Ipswich town centre. Not the bare, sorry facts of an almost unrecognisable friend, reduced to climbing into strangers' cars in a desperate attempt to buy heroin. "I just keep thinking why, why it all happened," she says. "She didn't need to do that. She was so lovely. She didn't need to do that." Annette Nicholls - Netty to those who loved her - was yesterday confirmed as the last of the five women whose bodies have been dumped in the past six weeks in the countryside around Ipswich. But while police look for the murderer, for the families and friends of the five women, almost as pressing a question this week has been that terrible why. Why five young girls, remembered again and again by schoolfriends, siblings and parents as lively and loving young people, grew up to become sex workers, some of them homeless, vulnerable to a monstrous killer. The crude answer to that question is what Tania Nicol's grieving parents yesterday called the "secret world" of drugs. All five of the women were addicted to drugs, mostly heroin, though Anneli Alderton is reported to have avoided opiates in favour of crack cocaine. Netty Nicholls, by the end, was so desperate for heroin that even her fellow sex workers disapproved of the lengths she would go to in order to get it. Two days before she was last seen, she stole a phone from a customer and sold it for ?20 to a dealer. On one occasion she agreed to join Paula Clennell, another of the murdered women, in "doing the double" with a client whom Ms Clennell had robbed to buy drugs in an attempt to placate him. Her friend Suzanne, another sex worker, had fallen out with her shortly before her death because she offered to sleep with Suzanne's boyfriend if he would just give her heroin. She had a "sugar daddy", says one of the women, and sometimes would stay with him. At other times she would have nowhere to sleep at night. It was a simple question of survival, says Brian Tobin, manager of Iceni, an independent drugs treatment centre in Ipswich. Like others working in drugs services in the town, he wants to respect the women's privacy after their deaths and prefers not to say if any of the five had used the centre's services. But while they treat 60 people at any one time, and between 20 and 30 women each year working in the sex industry, including escorts and parlour workers, only five or six street workers would come for treatment in any one year. "They are tremendously difficult people to connect with, just because of the desperation of their circumstances," he says. "Men can commit the physical crimes, burglary for instance, if they are desperate for money. But with these women, if they have sunk this low, all they have left is their bodies. People have got to understand the potency of addiction." Ipswich has had sex workers for decades, says Mr Tobin, and they have always used drugs in some form. The difference in the past three to five years is that dealers from London and other big cities have come to regard small, rural market towns as their next big opportunity. Ipswich is the second cheapest place in the country to buy crack, at ?20 for a rock, according to the national drugs charity Drugscope. Heroin is ?20 a bag. A 10ml dose of methadone, sold on by someone supposedly withdrawing but apparently still desperate for heroin, costs ?1. In September the charity identified a rise in the town of "speedballing" - mixing crack and heroin together before injecting. Since the effects of crack wear off quickly, users find themselves injecting more often, and in greater amounts. Ten or 15 years ago the people he saw with serious drugs addictions were 40 or 42, Mr Tobin says. Today they have terrible problems by their 20s. "For some I would say the average life, once you're a heavy heroin user, is about five years. Death isn't rock bottom for most of our clients. I have seen the desolation and the lack of hope. There's no life left in some of these girls." Since drug-using sex workers started being murdered, Ipswich's drugs services have begun to fast-track those who want treatment; instead of having to wait up to three weeks to get a methadone prescription, those who want one can now get it within a day. But, says Harry Shapiro, editor of Druglink magazine, helping women like these out of heroin addiction is much more complex than simply getting them on a "script". "It's not life-threatening to withdraw from heroin, but for people who have little or no support, it's something many of them cannot face trying to go through. The problems are what happens afterwards." Sex workers can access sexual health services, drug addicts can get drug treatment, homeless people can find hostel accommodation. But if you have all three problems, and especially if you throw mental health issues into the mix, your problems can quickly appear too complex to manage. Most women's hostels, for instance, will not accept drug users. Addicts who are verbally or physically abusive to their doctors can find themselves barred from the surgeries and thus denied medical treatment. "The system breaks down when you have people with these kinds of problems together," says Mr Shapiro. In Ipswich, a survey two years ago found that more than half the street sex workers were homeless, 93% were heroin users, 82% used crack. Of 21 women with children, only three had not lost them to the care system or placed them with families. More than half were being treated for depression. Some of the murdered women took part in the survey. Neither Annette Nicholls's large, close-knit family, her many friends, nor the women with whom she worked will ever really know how she found herself in the terrible position she did before her death. Her cousin Tanya has described the change in Annette as "like flicking a switch". Sue Hindle, who knew her from when their children were at nursery together, noticed when she saw her a few months ago that she had lost a lot of weight. Her uncle, David Nicholls, blames an old boyfriend who, he says, introduced her to heroin before he was jailed a couple of years ago. Adrian Carpenter, another old friend, last saw her a couple of months ago when she called round at his house. "She had been a really stunning woman. When she knocked at the door I said, 'Is that the same woman?' What did he think had happened? "I didn't want to think about it." - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin