Documentary gave a glimpse into lives of heroin users
SWANSEA Love Story gave us a stark look at the gritty activity taking place on every day city streets back in 2009 as heroin users took drugs in broad daylight. Throughout the documentary, we met drug users as they told their often tragic back stories and the hard times in their lives up to that point.
Scenes showed them injecting drugs whilst stooped behind wheelie bins in raw and powerful footage laying bare the reality of addiction for all to see. The drugs resulted in the users having slurred speech, and rolled back eyes.
“You’ve got kids as young as 12 or 13 taking heroin, and you’ve got dealers selling it to them,” one woman told the documentary makers.
“They won’t care if a 12-yearold or an 11-year-old goes up to them and asks for a bag, as long as they get money. They should have more respect.”
We also see another drug user show the process of getting crack cocaine, explaining how he’d have to call a dealer, get in a taxi, then meet them outside a pre-arranged location. The film-makers follow him on the journey before then seeing him take the drug.
Another user tells the documentary of his day to day routine, including acknowledging the mantra of PMA - positive mental attitude, before adding: “What am I going to do today? Straight to the chemist, I’ll have my methadone, positive mental attitude, there’s one. Number two, go and score a f****** bag.
“I’m going to stop using any sort of drug before I get in touch with my children. Because it wouldn’t be fair on my children if they were to say: ‘That’s my daddy that is’, and someone else was to respond: ‘Your daddy’s a junkie’.”
Answering a question about whether there was more heroin in Swansea in the recent years which preceded the documentary, another interviewee responded: “People these days have grown up so terrible, everybody is using gear – everybody is doing it.
“People just don’t care because their mother or their father or their brother or their cousin is doing it, they’re all doing it.”