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A man of substance Sheryl Garratt Guardian Sunday 12 Nov 2000 It's a blustery morning in a Liverpool suburb and I'm accompanying the government's drugs tsar Keith Hellawell into the centre of a major international drugs organisation. It's a bit disappointing, really. A small, cramped office with four tatty desks and headache-inducing strip lighting. Here, unpaid volunteers offer phone counselling to desperate people from all over the UK and abroad. The callers tell the familiar stories of addiction. The shame. The misery. The lies to friends and family. A volunteer shows Hellawell an entry in her log detailing one addict's prodigious chemical intake, and he shakes his head. 'It's amazing what the human body can put up with.' Another - a former addict himself - talks of people committing suicide due to sudden withdrawal. But it isn't what you may think. This is the Council for Involuntary Tranquilliser Addiction, and the mind-altering substances they deal with are perfectly legal - given by doctors to help with sleeplessness or stress. It may surprise you that the government's Anti-Drugs Coordinator sees this as part of his remit. (He hates the term 'tsar', by the way, and gently corrects anyone who uses it.) But he is clear that it is. 'We shouldn't distinguish between substances,' he says. 'Just because it's prescribed and legal doesn't make it safe.' Our first meeting a few days earlier hadn't gone particularly well. We'd met in his shabbily grand wood-panelled room in the Cabinet Office. Hellawell was running late, and my scheduled two hours had been whittled down to one. He was courteous, talkative, expounding on his 10-year plan for tackling drugs, but the whole thing felt like sliding on a polished surface without ever seeing what lay beneath. When I suggested following him around for a few days, he seemed almost boyishly keen. 'People are surprised at how the community takes to me. They think I sit in an office, but I'm always out.' In Liverpool, it's easy to see why he was so enthusiastic. Imposing without ever being intimidating, Hellawell is good at the kind of bland jokes and pleasantries that put people at ease. He asks intelligent questions and listens carefully to the answers, making notes to take back to the relevant ministers. In the car afterwards, he feels this visit went well. Sometimes when he sees small voluntary groups, frustrations bubble over and he can feel like he's under attack. 'It's as if you should have gone in wearing body armour.' Nonetheless, Hellawell feels that such visits are a crucial part of his job, to explain his strategies and show people that he is listening. In the media, his rather mild and sensible views are often portrayed as 'controversial'. To many in the drugs field, impatient for a more radical agenda, he's a patsy put in place by a government with no idea how to react to the fact that drugs have become just another leisure activity. 'He's the Princess Di of the chemical generation,' says one cynic, 'travelling around the country getting his picture taken and giving out sympathy.' Drugs. A simple five-letter word, but one of our most emotive. Put it on the cover of a youth magazine, and you sell thousands more copies. Put it in a newspaper headline, and you have a story that thrills and frightens. Shout it out at the Tory conference with a promise of new penalties, and you have them eating out of your hand. (Although recent events may have changed that.) Hellawell himself rarely uses the word, preferring the more neutral 'substances'. The education programmes he plans for schools cover everything from the solvents that kill around 80 children a year to the biggest killers, alcohol and tobacco, as well as the illegal substances most people think of when they hear the word drugs. In his strategy documents, he stresses too that not all substances are equally bad: the emphasis is firmly on what he calls 'the drugs that actually do cause the pain and harm and criminality' - heroin and cocaine. Hellawell recalls the first drugs deaths he saw. He was a raw young police officer then, and didn't even know what heroin was. They were a husband and wife from Huddersfield - both doctors, one of the few groups with access to the substance in the early 60s - and he remembers looking at their emaciated bodies, wondering why intelligent people might do this to themselves. We'd be wrong to read too much into it, he says; this wasn't a pivotal moment for him. Police officers see all kinds of things the rest of us don't. Early in his police career, the consensus was that the best way to deal with drugs was to arrest everyone for everything. 'We were very intolerant,' he says. 'We'd take the contents of somebody's handbag or pockets and even tiny grains, if it could be proved that it was cannabis we would prosecute, feeling that we could criminalise it out of the system. Clearly, we didn't. And that doesn't address the issues of attraction to drugs, of people being destroyed by drugs.' He no longer believes that locking people up is the solution. Put an addict through successful treatment, he says, and you stop them committing crimes to finance their habit. Or dealing and creating new users. You improve their lives, but also the lives of their families and the community in which they live. He's negotiated more money for treatment than ever before. So much that he claims the problem now is not lack of funds for detox projects, but a shortage of trained staff to run them. Sefton, Merseyside. The Independence Initiative is an innovative community detox project. As the director gives a presentation on their work, Hellawell sits on the edge of his seat, completely absorbed. Afterwards, he gives a speech. He always talks off the cuff, which worries his wife Brenda before big events. But he finds it easier that way, more natural. He stresses his continuing support for treatment but also explains new initiatives to seize drugs and the money made from selling them. As well as detecting drugs coming into the country, they've trained dogs to find large wads of money going out. In 12 weeks at Heathrow, two dogs helped customs confiscate £10m. Hellawell repeats this figure gleefully. 'Twelve weeks. One airport. Two dogs. Ten million.' All I can think is how much cash must be flowing out of other airports, as well as on ferries and trains, and how it could ever be possible to halt such a lucrative trade. While Hellawell fields more questions about cannabis from local journalists, I talk to Dene, one of the project's successes. Until recently, he was in a wheelchair. He's been dead once - the hospital had to restart his heart. Dene was lucky. This flagship project didn't just help him detox. They encouraged him to join a gym, and build up his wasted muscles. He found an interest in photography. Before, his only friends were other junkies. But the project helped him forge a new social life, and even though his brother lived with him and was still using, he wasn't tempted back on to the gear. Now he's walking with a stick, enjoying his life, thinking of giving up cigarettes. 'My only remaining vice,' he says proudly. Before leaving, Hellawell makes a point of coming over to shake Dene's hand. Someone later tells me that, on his first visits to Merseyside, he caused a stir by talking more with the drug users and their families than the assembled suits. Everywhere I saw him go, he made time for the addicts and their families. He didn't judge, he didn't patronise, he didn't gush with sympathy. He talks to them as people, he shrugs. 'That's just how I am.' Keith Hellawell was born in Holmfirth, Huddersfield on 18 May 1942. He's uncomfortable talking about his background, though sometimes he'll mention it briefly, just to make sure people know he's not too grand. His dad was a baker, his mother a mill-worker who moonlighted as a singer. They separated when he was four, and he diplomatically describes his childhood as 'difficult'. He was left to fend for himself, and when pressured he'll describe a crowded tenement where violence and petty crime were routine, money was scarce and he learned survival skills early. He went down the local pit at the age of 15, leaving school with a final report that said: 'Keith excelled at sport, and little else.' Five years later, he fulfilled his childhood ambition to become a police officer and soon after married Brenda, who has clearly been a great support. In the force, he seemed to find his calling. He excelled in exams to such a degree that at first he was accused of cheating; when it became obvious that he was a natural, he was fast-tracked through the ranks. By 1965, he was the youngest sergeant in the country; a year later, the youngest inspector. He studied for a degree in law and a MSc in social policy in his own time, and his inexorable rise continued. He was deputy chief constable of Humberside by 1985; chief constable of Cleveland by 1990; chief constable of West Yorkshire by 1993. When I ask if he encountered a lot of resentment as an ex-miner rising through the ranks, he answers without hesitation. 'Yes,' he says. 'But that's life.' What his background seems to have given him was empathy, an understanding of those he policed. He hates what he calls 'inconsistencies', people being treated differently due to class, race or other differences. As chief constable, he closed down police-station bars, saying that if officers wanted to drink, they should go to a pub like everyone else. When the young were being demonised by a Tory government keen for scapegoats, he stated that most juvenile crime was committed by a handful of repeat offenders. He has called for the legalisation of brothels. But most of all, he has spoken about drugs. As early as 1969, he filed a report suggesting setting up a dedicated drugs squad. He spoke for the Association of Chief Police Officers on drugs issues, and was one of the first authority figures to acknowledge that most people took drugs recreationally not because they were weak or stupid, but because it was fun. For a long time, all controlled substances were considered equal. There is a problem with this, Hellawell points out. All drugs are clearly not the same. And legal substances can often cause comparable harm. Although saying such things can be difficult: 'It's still a very highly charged political issue.' But this, in the end, is the contradiction that sank Anne Widdecombe. Slurping champagne onstage after promising £100 fines for cannabis users was, perhaps, a hypocrisy too far. Hellawell will not be drawn into criticising her personally, though he says he can talk about the issues. 'The extreme zero-tolerance view just won't work.' Still, he sees the debate as a distraction from the real issues. 'Cannabis can't be legalised because the international community says it cannot.' Although some European countries are liberalising their laws, he argues that this isn't necessary in the UK. Most people now caught with cannabis here are simply cautioned. No one is sitting in prison simply for puffing a joint. Later in the week, we drive from his first meeting of the day in Leeds on to Stockton on Tees. In the car with no government press officer present, he seems relaxed for the first time, chatting and sharing interesting facts from his briefing papers. He's still a good-looking man, tall with an affluent tan, a well-groomed moustache, sharp cheekbones and even sharper suits. Until he was 45, he stayed fit by running marathons, but he had to give it up after suffering a severe back injury in a car accident. He often jokes about putting on weight, but although I'm with him for two full days, I never see him eat. He tends to have only an evening meal, he explains, a habit picked up in his first job. If he ate down the pit, bending to work used to make him sick. When the post of Anti-Drugs Coordinator was announced by the New Labour government, it seemed to have been created with Hellawell in mind. In fact, he says he didn't even apply until the last minute, and then only after long discussions with his wife. He was happy in West Yorkshire - it paid well and though the hours could be long, Brenda could accompany him to any evening social engagements he had to attend. But it seemed to both of them that if he could be of service, then he should. His critics carp about his big salary, his lack of real power. They tend to portray him as man addicted to junkets, travelling abroad at the slightest pretext, touring the country in search of publicity while waiting out his time until retirement and the inevitable knighthood. But he wearily tells me he finds the travelling tiring, and he obviously misses his home in the north. His life in London is fairly solitary - by choice, he is quick to add. He describes himself as 'reserved'. When he first took the job, he was invited to parties and functions, but he finds them difficult without his wife at his side. When he has to be in the capital he stays at his club, but whenever possible he goes home to his converted farmhouse with a swimming pool in the Yorkshire countryside. He was 56 when he took the job. When I ask if he's planning to see his 10-year plan through, he laughs at the absurdity of the idea. He has a new three-year contract, but seems to hint that he may not finish it. He sees his job as opening up the debate, establishing budgets, getting the various agencies to work together, setting up structures so that others can take over the work and make it their own. Hellawell serves another useful purpose for the government, of course - he distances them from a difficult issue. So, while the Shadow Cabinet confessed their youthful indiscretions after the Widdecombe debacle, Labour left Hellawell to do the talking. It was he who pointed out that cannabis doesn't always act as a gateway to other drugs, and he who took the resulting flak. The Sun lined up heroin addicts to say they had started on cannabis (which is a bit like an alcoholic insisting that a first sip of cider inevitably leads to meths); the Mail 's headline trumpeted his £107,000 salary and asked 'What is the point of this man?'. This kind of coverage upsets his family, he says, particularly his son, who often wonders why he doesn't just walk away. He regrets not having more time for his son and two daughters. School plays, parents nights, sports days - Brenda did all of those, he says wistfully, he was never there. There are seven grandchildren now, with twins on the way in two weeks' time, and you get the feeling that he'd rather not be away in London while they grow up. Friday. Stockton-on-Tees Town Hall. The 20 or so people clustered round the council table do not want to talk about cannabis. This area has a large number of heroin addicts, and few resources as yet to help them. 'My son has been on heroin for six years,' says one woman emotionally. 'In my extended family, there are another six on heroin. Their children are growing up now, and seeing it as a way of life. And that is where the dealers are going. They've already got our sons and daughters. Now they're going for our grandchildren.' Hellawell answers points made by GPs, councillors and police officers calmly and clearly. To the addicts' parents, all he can say is that the money is there, that treatment will come. 'It takes time. It just takes time.' Later we drive out to a community centre in nearby Thornaby to listen to the worries of residents. They are quiet, respectable, concerned. The stories they tell are harrowing. Heroin use is epidemic here, and few families are untouched by it. A pretty 17-year-old girl stands up to beg for residential detox. They have no access to such facilities. She quickly dissolves into tears. Painfully thin, she's been on heroin since she was 14. Her boyfriend is also a user. She cannot look after their baby any more, and her mother has had to take over. 'I feel so guilty!' she sobs. 'I don't know why my family puts up with me.' Hellawell has nothing new to offer in the face of such misery. He repeats that the money is there, that treatment is coming. And acknowledges that this is little comfort to people who are living - and dying - with these problems. While the media trawl the toilets in Parliament for grains of cocaine, argue about cannabis, or pretend that Ecstasy is killing our young in droves, this is the reason Hellawell took this post, the real problem he has to address. 'Our children are committing slow suicide - we need more than just words,' says Tina Williams, one of the Thornaby mothers. 'Words aren't going to save a life. He might be a nice man, but he's got to deliver.'
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