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There are no secrets between Ellen, a lone mother from Paisley, and Dorothy, a middle-class Ayrshire housewife, although in the normal course of events their paths would probably never have crossed.
They have been brought together by a painful subject: drug abuse by a member of their family. As they have learned, the problem no- one wants to talk about affects more and more "nice, normal, respectable families", as Dorothy describes them.
She was one of them, until she discovered her son was a drug addict. "Everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard President Kennedy had been shot, or Princess Diana was dead. It's the same when you hear your child is an addict." For her, that moment came four years ago when her severely ill son was brought home by a friend. She had no idea what was wrong and phoned a friend of his, who asked: "Didn't you know he's on heroin?"
Brian was 30 and, after university, had been involved in creating and producing music without managing to string together a coherent career. He was far from the stereotype of an addict; school reports described him as hard-working and at the age of 15 he was fit and courageous enough to swim across Lake Windermere.
For this boy, whose future had seemed so bright, to become a wreck on the floor, made her feel not just despairing but "isolated, stigmatised and shattered". Eventually she and Brian found a sympathetic GP who prescribed a heroin substitute, but it was two years before she discovered a family support group through the Bridge Project in Ayrshire.
"It was a relief to find people who understood, because, when there's an addict in the family, every member of the family suffers. For every drug user, probably 10...