MSP Annie’s vow after two addict friends died

CONSERVATIVES’ RISING STAR ON HOW COMING OUT

Annie Wells only has to look out of her living room window to remind herself why she does her job.

She’s in a unique position – a politician still living in the deprived area she now serves as a Tory MSP. It was from her sofa one day last summer that she watched two men in the grip of heroin addiction struggle to walk along the pavement. This was a fami l iar sight for the 45-year- old who has lived in the same home in Glasgow’s Springburn since she was a baby. So Annie isn’t fazed by Scotland’s drugs battle – she’s been surrounded by its casualties her whole life. But she revealed her desire for change in the area recently got personal after losing another chi ldhood friend to addiction. Last month as she left her f lat for Holyrood, she spotted emergency services in her street.

Her old school chum succumbed to drugs. He was the second playground pal of Annie’s to die in those circumstances.

The Tory health spokeswoman said: “I grew up with this guy. We played together, we were in and out of each other’s houses.

“His family lived on the same street. They were like my family. from a cocktail of heroin and methadone.” The man’s death came 20 years after Annie lost her best friend to drugs.

The young woman, only a couple of years older than Annie, had grown up in the same block of council f lats in the shadow of the city’s notorious and since demolished Red Road flats.

Annie said: “She was a lovely girl. I remember playing after school, marking out a tennis court with spraypaint at a nearby industrial estate when Wimbledon was on. We played for hours on end.”

The girls grew apart and she became aware her friend has started taking drugs.

Annie said: “She had a child and not long after I had my son.

“My mum called me to say she’d been found in a close, dead from an overdose.

“I remember the funeral, handing my son over to my mum so I could go. It