After kicking a ten-year drug habit, Kelly Anderson is helping others to do the same as chairperson of a service users' forum. Sarah Foster talks to her about how she got hooked on heroin in prison.

WHEN I arrive at the offices of the North-East Council on Addictions (Neca), in Sunderland, and first meet Kelly Anderson and her mentor Sharyn Smiles, the conversation starts, predictably enough, with the weather. It's a freezing morning and we all agree that with the snow still around, the temperature shows no sign of rising.

Of course, to me, there's nothing unusual about this - it's the sort of conversation I've had a million times before. But as we get onto the subject of Kelly's drug addiction, I discover that for her, it's something of a novelty. Sharyn says: "I only recently heard Kelly say 'God, have you seen the weather?' She'd never noticed the weather before. Getting out of bed and not being poorly because of heroin is such a great achievement for her. Nowadays, you wouldn't recognise Kelly as the same person she was."

Kelly's downward spiral into the sordid world of heroin addiction began at the age of 14. The group she hung around with at school started experimenting with solvents, sniffing lighter fuel and air fresheners, and she just went along with them. At around the same time, she first made contact with drug dealers when she went to them for sleeping tablets, which were well within a 14-year-old's budget at 50p each.

Kelly, from Sunderland, says the dealers were people she regularly saw on the streets and that to her, there was nothing unusual in doing business with them. "It was quite natural. It was one of those things people did."

She was kicked out of school and at the age of 15, was sentenced to four months in a young offenders' institute for theft. She ended up at Low Newton prison and young offenders' institute, in Durham, which at that time housed adults and children together. Kelly's cellmate was an adult heroin addict, and it wasn't long before she was tempted to try it. "She kept smoking it so I had a go and liked it. At the time, that's what Low Newton was like. I got out and started taking it. It wasn't that easy to get hold of then - it's much easier today," she says.

Following her cellmate's example, Kelly began smoking heroin on a daily basis, getting it from the dealers she already knew. At £10 a bag and £90 a gram, it wasn't cheap, so inevitably she reverted to stealing.

"I stole off anyone to get it. There would be money or gold jewellery on the mantle piece at home and I would just steal it and act like nothing was the matter. Heroin was before my family, before anything else. At the time you have no morals," she says.

Although her parents and five brothers were "devastated" by her addiction, Kelly says she didn't listen to them, even when they begged her to get help. "My family tried lots of times to help me but I wasn't ready. You've got to be ready to come off it and want to do it yourself."

In the meantime, her constant stealing was landing her in court on a regular basis. Although she is still only 25, Kelly estimates that she has been in prison, either on remand or serving a sentence, a staggering 22 times. She says: "Every time I went to prison, I was only out for a week or two then I was back in."

Her time inside was divided between Low Newton and New Hall prison in Wakefield. She says drugs were freely available in both. "Heroin was coming in in different ways. If people really wanted to get it, they did, on visits or in the post. I knew everyone so I used to just get it for nothing most of the time."

When I ask if the prison authorities were aware of this, and what they did to try to stop it, Kelly says simply: "They knew but there was nothing they could do."

Towards the end of her addiction, she changed from smoking heroin to injecting it, leaving lasting needle marks on her arms. She explains: "I just couldn't feel it much any more and as soon as I started injecting it, I started getting that feeling again."

While I understand that Kelly felt good during the highs, I wonder what it was like when the effects of the heroin wore off, expecting her to say she lapsed into bleak depression. But although she admits that there were bad times, she says: "The drugs never wore off because I just kept topping them up all the time."

The consequence of this, as I realise when I try to pin her down on the details of her life as an addict, seems to be that much of it has been lost in a haze. When I ask her to describe an extreme case of her stealing, or a scene with her family that sticks in her mind, her replies are vague.

The one thing she constantly cites is the pain she caused her family, to whom she returned every time she came out of prison. "My family has been very supportive. They are over the moon to see the changes in me," she says.

In the end, what precipitated Kelly's withdrawal from heroin was the same justice system that, arguably, introduced her to it in the first place. "Last year I got sick of it, then the courts gave me a chance and put me on methadone" (a heroin substitute used to wean addicts off the drug). I was getting lots of support through Cat (the Community Addiction Team) and Neca. The most important thing was when I became chairperson of the Sunderland service users' forum."

The forum, called Voice, was recently set up to enable 18 drug users and former drug users to express their views on the services available for people like themselves. After she was instrumental in establishing it, Kelly was voted as chairperson and now attends meetings of the Sunderland Drug Action Team, as well as representing the city on the regional service users' forum.

In her short year of being clean she has come a long way, although she recognises that she still has some way to go. "I'm training to be what Sharyn is. I would like to give people the help and support I've had," she says.

Sharyn, who works for Sunderland Drug Action Team, has known Kelly for many years and is confident the former addict is already making a difference. Fellow addicts who know her can't believe she's come off heroin. "Kelly's always wanted to get clean. I always knew that," she says. "Other addicts are really inspired by her."

Although she had to wait for nine years and endure prison 22 times before being offered treatment and crucial support, Kelly doesn't blame the system for failing her. "I'm not a person who blames anyone. If it wasn't me going to court they wouldn't have been able to put me in jail," she says.

But when I ask her if she's worried about slipping back into her habit, she shows a spark of real determination. "You live by heroin or die by it if you don't get off that road. I've chosen the heroin all my life but now I'm choosing my future," she says. "When I chose the heroin I could do that, so now I'm choosing my future I can do that as well."

* Voice can be contacted on 0800 583 2015.

* Anyone wanting information on local organisations offering support on drug-related issues should contact Frank (formerly the National Drugs Helpline) on 0800 776600.