MARLENE Johnston gestures to the quilt on the wall: “That boy waited until staff in his rehab unit were asleep, then showered, put his best clothes on and hung himself.
“That lassie”, she points, “was dumped in a close”.
The quilt, two decades in the making, is a tribute to some of Glasgow’s children lost to drugs, and the lives of families left devastated. Marlene knows that pain –she’s lost two sons to addiction, 20 years apart.
It was after her oldest, Robert died, in 1995, aged 23, that she joined the Glasgow Association of Family Support Groups as a volunteer. Inspired by a quilt commemorating victims of the early Aids outbreak in San Francisco, Marlene and Marie McGonigle, another bereaved mum, started a memorial quilt for other drug victims like Robert.
“Robert was addicted to temazepam. He had always said he would never inject, but in May 1994 he confessed to me that he had started smoking ‘that stuff’. I didn’t realise at the time he meant heroin.”
In February 1995, Robert disappeared for a few days. Police found his partially decomposed body after three weeks. He had taken his first and last intravenous hit, before being wrapped in a carpet by persons unknown and abandoned in a locked flat.
Marlene helped launch the quilt, which now contains dozens of panels and is hung at an annual remembrance service in a Glasgow church. She went on to train to support others - first an HnC in social care, and later took a counselling course.
Yesterday, she ‘retired’ after 22 years as first a volunteer then a counsellor with charities including Families Addiction Support Service (FASS), the association’s current name, as well as Aberlour, the Glasgow Drug Crisis Centre, and the New Horizon rehab service.
Over that time, Marlene has helped more than a thousand families. Yet she was revisited by personal tragedy, when her other son Joseph – who was just ten when Robert died – succumbed to street valium. He had struggled with feelings of hopelessness and low self esteem. “I found him, I said: ‘Joseph, please don’t do this to me.’ He had died. I just thought ‘my god what am I going to do’?”
Her faith helps her to carry on, she says, as well as the chance to help others. “People allow me into their life, it’s a privilege. I feel blessed,” she says. “I have worked with people who are on their knees.”
She says Joseph’s death did not lead to her decision to step back from drugs work, before she turns 69 next month.
Her contribution, from helping change the attitudes of the courts and police, to helping parents and relatives of drug users in their hour of need, was marked at a lunch in her honour. She admits the help on offer has been transformed in two decades.
She is saddened by the latest figures showing drugs deaths soaring in Scotland. She is also horrified it receives so little attention. “It is the ultimate nightmare. You’ve brought these children into the world nurtured them and protected them. We’ve got boys and lassies dying every day you just don’t hear about it,” she says.
Many will judge the victims , she knows. But there is not enough funding for support, especially mental health services, and help for abused women. “I’ve worked with hundreds of addicts. If you took away that addiction, I’ve only come across maybe five that weren’t very nice.”
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