Habit arrested by police, says singer

Press, 29 May 1985, Page 8

Habit arrested by police, says singer

NZPA staff correspondent Sydney The expatriate New Zealand singer, Allison Durbin, has told a television interviewier how the police probably saved her life when they found her in a druginduced stupor in her car last year.

In a frank interview about how heroin addiction had devastated the last 10 years of her life, Miss Durbin said that the ordeal came to a dramatic end when she was found slumped over the steering wheel of her car in the Sydney suburb of Elizabeth Bay in July last year. “I think the police saved my life because I had overdosed a lot of times before and one day could have been found dead,” she said

on the Mike Walsh show on Monday evening. She was arrested and charged with possessing and using heroin, but earlier this year put on a sAust2oo ($306) good behaviour bond. No criminal conviction was recorded. The former “Queen of Pop” aged 34, said her habit had cost up to sAust2soo ($3825) a week, and had led to a marriage break-up and the loss of her two children. “It was devastating, it frightened the life out of me,” Miss Durbin said.

“I was trying not to use heroin, I desperately tried many times to stop. “In the end I was working to support my habit. If I stopped work I fell to pieces and if I did not work I could not support the habit.” Miss Durbin said that

after the birth of her second son, Cameron, in 1976 she had gone straight back to work, putting a heavy workload on herself. She found that she was addicted to tablets prescribed by her doctor, was sick and desperately searching for something to replace what she was on when she was introduced to heroin by a friend. “I tried it because I didn’t have anything else and at the time I needed something to relax me,” she said.

“I thought I was the one who could try it once. The second time I thought I could do it twice — but it kept on.” Miss Durbin said she was undergoing rehabilitation, planned to remarry, and to make an album as well as travel to the United States.