MY £210-A-DAY CRACK AND HEROIN HABIT:
THE first thing Rhiannon does when we step into her small flat is apologise for the mess. She pushes some papers under the table and moves the pile of clothes from the dark leather sofa to her bed, inviting us to take a seat as she sits in the old, stained cream armchair opposite.
She quickly clears the table’s closest corner to her and takes a few tiny wraps out of her handbag.
She asks Barrie – who has previously opened up about his own addiction – to put some music on. It feels like a party with a terribly sad undertone.
Looking focused, she carefully unwraps a tightly-packed white rock and another wrap with a fine brown powder. Crack cocaine and heroin.
Rhiannon places them in the cooker, dissolving them with water and an acid. She cooks the mixture up with a lighter, which gets darker as it bubbles.
Preparing her drugs in her small flat in Mayhill, Swansea, Rhiannon says she feels excited.
“I am looking forward to how it is going to make me feel – I feel butterflies in my stomach,” she says.
The 36-year-old “snowballs”, also known as “speedballing”, meaning she injects heroin together with crack cocaine. She does this five or six times a day.
Each “hit” costs her £35, she says, meaning she can spend up to £210 a day on drugs.
Rhiannon’s life revolves around drugs – constantly worrying about where she is going to get money next, terrified of going into withdrawal – and she is far from being the only one.
While the significant rise of heroin deaths across Wales – from less than 60 in 2000 to nearly 160 in 2016 – is well-documented, crack cocaine is less spoken about.
Apart from the countless lives ruined, record numbers of people are being killed by cocaine. ONS figures do not distinguish between different forms of cocaine so it is impossible to know exactly how many people are being killed by crack cocaine, a crystallised form of the Class A drug.
However, NHS Wales figures show referrals where crack cocaine is the main problematic substance are rising steadily from 118 in 2012/13 to 161 in 2016/17. However, it is still in a minority for now – making up just under 1% of referrals, with alcohol (52.8%) and heroin (18.5%) having the most referrals.
In Swansea, where Rhiannon lives, a drug and alcohol agency has seen the increased availability of crack cocaine, with drug dealers targeting heroin users and aggressively marketing the two drugs together, offering deals.
The phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact drugs are being made more easily available by serious criminal gangs from larger English cities like London, Birmingham and Liverpool who send vulnerable teenagers to cities like Swansea and Cardiff to deal for them – what police call county lines dealing.
Caught in the middle of all this are people like Rhiannon, a skinny blonde woman with piercing blue
eyes. On the day we meet, it is the hottest July day on record and she is wearing shorts together with a flowery top which shows off the tribal tattoo on her back.
When we talk, she looks at me straight in the eye, confidently, but finds it hard to stay still – crossing and uncrossing her thin, long legs, smoking one cigarette after another.
Rhiannon has been “snowballing” for a year but has used drugs since her early teens, when she smoked cannabis. After that came party drugs such as Ecstasy or speed as well as depressants like benzodiazepines.
“When my father killed himself, I tried coping with his death by blocking it out with heroin,” she says. “I was 24. I smoked it for three or four years and then I started injecting.”
The first time she tried crack she was at a friend’s house in Clydach, she says.
Having run out of heroin and starting to withdraw, Rhiannon remembered some people were smoking heroin through a glass pipe the night before. She found the pipe and melted the leftovers, known as “recycle” – into a cooker, ready to inject.
What she didn’t realise was they had been smoking crack with the heroin. Accidentally, she had just tried her first “snowball”.
“That is how I always use now [mixing heroin and crack].
“I take it because I enjoy taking it, but I do not like the lifestyle that comes with it. “It helps me block things out. “Crack makes me feel happy and confident for a while.
“The initial rush is a couple of minutes and after that I feel gutted because I am not rushing any more.”
Rhiannon says she isn’t a stupid person, and knows she is capable of things, but the drugs stop that from happening.
When she was a child, she aspired to become a vet because she loves animals. In fact, she prefers them to humans, she says. Joe – a Staffy – is her dog and she says he has saved her life a few times.
He gives her responsibility and someone to care for, “rather than just being selfish all the time”.
“There is so much more to me than the drugs I take but that is all people focus on,” she says.
She loves art and sport and would like to go back to studying one day, having dropped out of school at the age of 14, before completing her GCSEs.
“I would like to go back into education but it feels it isn’t going to happen because I am an addict,” she says. “One of the things I hate about being an addict is how unreliable it makes me.”
Withdrawing terrifies her, she says, not only because of the physical effects it has on her body but also on her mind. She has self-harmed in the past while withdrawing.
Rhiannon says she is constantly worried about where she is going to get the money for her drugs next.
She pays for her drugs with her benefits and says she “sells the idea of sex”, making men think something is going to happen. She asks them for money, telling them she will pop round later “to make them feel good”.
Describing sex work as the easiest way to get money, Rhiannon says she would have to be desperate to do it.
“It is very tiring, exhausting,” she continues. “I have never stolen off my family or my friends, but I have stolen from shops.
“I remember once I asked my grandmother if she had a tenner and she said no.
“When she went to the kitchen I went into her purse and got some money. The feeling of tremendous guilt was immediate and before she came back I put the money back – I could not do it.
“The thought had crossed my mind... I still beat myself up about it. That was a long time ago.”
Jamie Harris, service manager for Swansea-based drug and alcohol agency Barod, is perfectly aware of the dependency crack cocaine creates as it stimulates key pleasure centres within the brain and causes extremely heightened euphoria.
“Crack cocaine is one of the most powerful drugs when it comes to producing psychological dependence,” he says.
“A tolerance can develop quickly – the person soon fails to achieve the same high experienced earlier from
the same amount of crack cocaine, hence the potential move towards injecting and increase in time used throughout a normal day.
“The increase in use means the more challenging withdrawals can be, so by using heroin, this can assist with the come down.
“This can be exacerbated if there are existing or underlining mental health issues.”
Mr Harris said there was a market place for the drug in Swansea and drug dealers were using aggressive marketing tactics such as constant texting and deals.
“The drug is sometimes referred to as a treat, something different to the norm from other drugs used such as heroin,” he continues. “Price is also competitive and, being available in smaller amounts, it makes it more affordable for those with little or no money.
“We are finding that heroin users are being targeted by dealers predominantly, as they already inject and look for drugs.”
Describing them as a “minority group with extreme complex needs”, Mr Harris said crack injecting is more damaging to the veins and tissues than heroin because, as it has a local anaesthetic effect, it leads to users “digging” around in their veins.
The solution is often very acidic – because too much has been added to get the drug to dissolve – and therefore causes significant additional vein damage, he said.
“Mixing the two drugs together will significantly increase the risk of an overdose due to how the two interact in your body as well as the potential misjudgment of dosage when cooking the drugs up prior to administering the substances,” he says.
Rhiannon is conscious of the dangers of her drug use and, at the back of her mind, are the people she has seen lose limbs. She has also lost friends to drugs and, on one occasion, she was using with a close friend of hers and, when she came round, he had died of an overdose.
Despite all this, the pull of the drugs is too strong and Rhiannon says these days she finds it hard to find a vein.
Unlike some of the other people she knows, Rhiannon enjoys the privacy of having her own flat, having lived in Mayhill for two and a half years.
Before that, she was homeless for 12 years, which she says was absolutely awful. She claims she was given the property after being stabbed and losing a kidney.
She was diagnosed with PTSD after the attack, as well as depression.
“My mental health suffered a lot while I was homeless,” she says. “Just being able to close the door and shut the world out... I feel safe.
“Now, my mental health isn’t 100% there but it isn’t as bad as it has been.”
Having been in prison five or six times in the past, Rhiannon hasn’t been in any trouble since having her own place, because she doesn’t have to be around people she doesn’t want to be with, she says.
“I would love not to have an addiction,” she says. “Addiction comes with a huge stigma. I think a lot of people think ‘they are scumbags and bad people’. “It makes me feel angry and sad. “There are always reasons behind someone’s drug use – nobody becomes a drug addict because they want to. It is not a choice, drugs are a coping mechanism.
“They do not fix your problems, but they help you forget about them.
“Drugs are wrecking families and communities. I want to break some of the stigma and change perceptions.”
Speaking outside Swansea’s bus station, 30-year-old Carl agrees there is a lot more crack in Swansea at the moment. He says crack is easier to get now, claiming he knew of 10 people in the city that would sell to him. They come from outside Wales from places such as London, he claims.
“They give you stuff for free and they also do deals, like four [rocks of crack cocaine] for £30,” says Carl, who has been taking heroin for a decade.
“There are a lot more dealers here. I have to get heroin because I have a habit but the crack is a treat for me.
“But there is a lot more people for whom crack is becoming a habit now.
“Crack is more addictive than heroin in a different way – it makes you want more and more. The high only lasts five or 10 minutes.”
He says he makes his money begging, but admitted he had only just come out of jail for shoplifting a couple of months ago.
“The first time I took crack it was six years ago,” he continues. “I didn’t like it, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was scared. “I was super paranoid and fidgety.” Carl, who is homeless and sleeps on the streets or sofa-surfs, says he has ADHD, so crack was not a good drug for him but that he liked it to pass the time.
“You do get bad batches that taste like cleaning products and make you sick for a couple of days,” he adds.
On other occasions, dealers try to rip buyers off, he claimed, just picking something off the floor and trying to pretend it is crack.
As we speak, Rhiannon sometimes just sits there, not listening, but deep in thought.
Reflecting on her current situation, she continues: “I know I could never get clean living in Swansea.
“In the past 10 years, I have seen such an influx of heroin and crack – there is so much more of it than there was a few years back.
“Crack and heroin come hand in hand – it is an epidemic.”
South Wales Police’s Detective Chief Inspector Helen Woodward said that, unfortunately, Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot had large numbers of drug users, and drug dealers would always exploit areas where there is a demand for their products.
She added: “This is not a problem unique to Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot; however, organised criminals involved in county lines rarely confine their illegal activities to one area; often thinking they’re untouchable as they travel up and down the country.
“The rise in the number of county lines gangs operating across the UK has had an impact on the quantities of Class A drugs being dealt in the area, and we are finding that there is no shortage of drugs for those wishing to buy them.
“Sadly, it’s become normalised for people to see a drug user in the street, or street dealing taking place, and it’s concerning that people aren’t contacting the police to report what they’re seeing.”
Ms Woodward said tackling county lines criminality was a priority and enforcement was carried out on an almost daily basis, with hundreds having been convicted and sentenced for possession and supply of Class A drugs. She continued: “However, the local communities have a vital role to play in helping us to do this; they cannot turn a blind eye to this kind of criminality. Without the community pulling together, we are fighting a losing battle. I’d urge the public to work with us, telling us what they know and sharing their suspicions and concerns.”
Anyone with any information about illegal drug activity in their community should contact 101, or 999 in an emergency.
“There is so much more to me than the drugs I take but that is all people focus on RHIANNON