U.K. teachers shown heroin users’ tools

Press, 14 June 1984, Page 14

U.K. teachers shown heroin users’ tools

NZPA-AAP London A headmaster has shocked colleagues by showing them the tools of the heroin trade which plagues his London school.

Mr Brindley Morgan produced a paper bag full of paraphernalia used by addicted young people in “chasing the drag." The screwed-up silver foil stained brown with heroin and the matches used to heat the drug for sniffing were, he said, found in the streets, round Walworth School, his 1200-pupil comprehensive in south-east London.

Mr Morgan, aged 48, spoke at the National Association of Head Teachers’ annual conference

in Brighton, of the "horrible menace" of heroin. He said truants and unemployed teen-agers had graduated from sniffing glue and smoking cannabis to using heroin after wealthy pushers moved in on local housing estates, giving the drug away at first to get them hooked. Once dependent, the young people were charged ’£s (about $11) a time and were forced to turn to crime to satisfy their habit.

Mr Morgan,' a father of three teen-agers, said he first learned of the problem after pensioners in the area complained that young people were meeting on the stairways of blocks of flats to take heroin.

Describing the drug as a deadly weapon," he urged

fellow school heads to speak out strongly against it.

One backer is Mr Graham Leech, of Range High School in Form by, Lancashire.

"I want to avoid exaggerating the size of the problem but it is one we must acknowledge and do something about," Mr Leech said. "Drugs are getting cheaper and are being taken by all sections of society. Young victims include the rich and poor, the intelligent and the stupid." He accused parents of letting children down by using alcohol or nicotine to solve their own problems. "No wonder young people today think the answer to their problem is pillshaped," he said.