When Liz Gent left her native Oxford for a new life in the sunshine of the southern hemisphere 18 years ago, she hardly expected to find hell in paradise, writes GEORGE FREW.

Born, educated and married to her husband Patrick in Oxford, she had emigrated to Perth, Western Australia, with him and their two small children, Kirsty and Tristan.

Like any other parents, Liz and Patrick wanted the best for their kids and believed they would find it Down Under. Instead Liz - a former St John volunteer and currently a first-aid instructor with the Red Cross - has found herself working with 12-year-old street prostitutes and with people whose craving for one particular opiate has blighted their hopes, all but destroyed their lives and, in extreme cases, left them turning blue and dying in the gutter.

The drug in question is, of course, heroin - cheap, easy to come by, powerfully addictive and potentially fatal. Concerned mum Liz, 49, responded to the Australian Governor General's challenge for communities to tackle the drugs issue by setting up SAM - Save A Mate - last year.

Death by overdose is common among heroin users. In Australia, they call it "chucking a bluey", because the addict's feet and hands turn blue. When this happens, it's a case of be resuscitated - or die. This is where Liz's SAM scheme comes in.

PFor about £4, the parents, friends, partners and families of drug users can take a four-and-a-half-hour first aid course which may one day make them able to save a user's life.

Last year, around 80 addicts OD'd in Western Australia.

"We even have a few recovering addicts who have taken the SAM course," explained Liz, who is on holiday here to visit her Oxford relatives.

"Drugs are a very big problem worldwide and the users are getting younger. Years ago, it used to be thought of as a particular problem on a particular level. Not any more - it affects everyone. "Users are prone to hepatitis. Their veins collapse. They lose weight. And sometimes, they die. I came up with the SAM scheme after we'd had a boy whose girlfriend had OD'd and wasn't breathing for about eight minutes. He didn't know what to do. If he'd been able to keep her going until the ambulance had arrived, she'd still be alive. But people get frightened - they run away, or they leave the addict in a doctor's doorway."

In addition to her Red Cross work with SAM, Liz also spends seven hours a week as a volunteer at the clinic of Dr George O'Neil, described as a "friend and confidante to the heroin addicts of Western Australia".

Dr O'Neil's treatment of heroin addiction uses a product called Naltrexone, which unlike the traditional Methadone treatment, is not an opiate and is therefore incapable of causing another addiction.

The drug acts as a 'blocker' to the receptors in the human body which react to heroin and is administered via a specially-designed drip. "The user comes into the clinic with their 'carer' - who can be a friend, a partner or a parent - and first talks about the treatment," revealed Liz. "But they've go to want to be treated. So far, the programme has had excellent results and Dr O'Neil has treated over 900 addicts." Most heroin users need at least two goes at the programme to become 'clean'. Second time around, there is an 80 per cent success rate. Dr O'Neil's treatment and the SAM programme are all heavily reliant on volunteers like Liz Gent. "If a similar programme could be started here in Oxford, with its drug problems, it'd be fabulous," she said.

Chris Edmonds, who is a Youth Intervention Worker with the SMART criminal justice project, agrees. "Something like SAM would be a good idea," she said. "I wouldn't have thought we had anything like that at the moment. There are very few services for drug users in Oxford and this sounds like a good, practical idea - especially among young people, who are a high risk group."

Thames Valley force drugs co-ordinator, Det Insp Ian Robinson, said: "There are harm reduction programmes which are, to some extent, being carried out here.

"But as far as I'm aware, there's nothing like SAM and anything like this has got to be a good thing. In theory, it sounds excellent, but people who are likely to suffer an overdose lead chaotic lifestyles and so do those around them, so they wouldn't turn up for the course - and then would we be getting through to the right people? There is a heroin problem in Oxford, although it is no worse than any comparably sized city. Having said that, heroin is getting everywhere. It goes right across society and there are no barriers."

And right across continents, too. Liz Gent's voluntary Red Cross work takes her to the prisons, clinics and remand centres of Western Australia. If she'd stayed in Oxford, it could just as easily been the same here.

In either hemisphere, it's never difficult to find the walking, wounded evidence of the needle and the damage done.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.