Garry Powell was a 28-year-old family man with a job when he became hooked on drugs. Twelve months after his death from an overdose, mum Joan and dad Robert are still wondering why?

CHRISTMAS HAS a special significance for Joan Powell.

For the 57-year-old grandmother of five from Little Horton in Bradford it means the anniversary of the death of her eldest son, Garry, from a drugs overdose.

Joan had to go through a lot when her son fell prey to drugs. It tested their close relationship to the limit.

But Garry wasn't a young boy mixing with the wrong crowd, or 'going through a phase', he was a married man with three young children and had everything to live for.

Joan never imagined that she'd have any problems when she saw her five children grown up and settled.

She thought she could look forward to a relatively stress-free life.

One of her sons, Darren, 30, is the managing director of a firm in Harrogate and her youngest son Jason, 26, also holds down a good job in the same company.

Garry was also settled with a good steady job.

Joan said: "He was a bit of a tearaway in his younger days but he didn't do big bad things.

"He had his heart in the right place and he was very caring. He always stood up for his brothers and adored his baby sister Lindsay," says his mother, who works as a burler and mender at the Laisterdyke firm Texil.

To this day the family cannot be totally certain what drove him to drugs, but Joan believes they are so easily accessible that he simply fell prey.

"He was 28 and he came into contact with drugs and suddenly everything changed. He was up one minute and down the next.

Joan, fighting back the tears, said: "You love all your children equally but sometimes one needs more love than the rest and that was the case with Garry.

"Nothing has been more important to me than my children, and when they suffer, I suffer. But they grow up and make their own choices and there is nothing you can do about it.

"Garry was never out of work, he always took his job very seriously, and worked hard.

He always came to see me, he was always close to me."

But, once he was hooked on heroin, the respectable family man with children of 13, ten and six was unable to stop his spiral into despair.

Joan said: "Suddenly his attitude changed and for the first time in his life he asked me for money. He'd never done that before and his whole outlook on life changed.

"He never stopped caring about us and he still came to see me every day but before he'd been concerned about himself and now he just didn't care.

"He was smoking heroin at this point and when he was on it he was all right but you could see the desperation in his eyes when he was due a fix. It was horrific watching him go through that.

"Obviously there was going to be an effect on his wife and children and he was asked to leave his home and seek help.

"He was willing to go and get help and he did get some medication. But in my opinion that just made him worse. He just had no control over himself."

Joan's boss, Christopher Eyles, met Garry many times.

He said: "Garry was an intelligent conversationalist with a good sense of humour.

"But by the second phase of my knowing him, things had radically changed. His looks and manner had deteriorated. If he knew that I knew the problem, he never said.

"On one occasion I remember him coming to work and he argued with his mother and on leaving wandered the street outside, before sitting on the pavement, head in hand. If ever there was a figure of despair, Garry was it."

Garry then began a more disturbing and dangerous aspect of his addiction - dealing. This made his behaviour even worse and he became even more erratic.

Joan said: "He was sent to prison in February 1997 for drug offences and served a 12-month sentence. When he came out he was clean but this wasn't to last long.

"He was even offered a job by his brother but he couldn't free himself of his problems and he went back to his previous state.

"I would have moved heaven and earth to help him but I couldn't do anything. He went to the doctor's and he was referred to a drugs clinic and it was five months before he was able to get an appointment.

"I know that he lied to the doctor about his heroin usage to get more medication. It's a trick that many addicts use."

Garry's father, Robert, also 57, said: "He was so drugged up. He was like a zombie with all the stuff he was taking.

"I said to him that if he carried on like that he wouldn't see his 35th birthday. I didn't mean it, I just wanted him to wake up and realise what he was doing but it was too late and it actually happened. It came true, he didn't make it."

What makes the death even more tragic was that it happened the night before Christmas Eve.

Joan said: "He'd been fine all day and he'd come to collect me from work and we'd gone to do a bit of shopping and have something to eat.

"I left him at about 2.15pm and we'd arranged to meet the next day.

"He had an appointment to see the housing association and he seemed fine. He had arranged to spend Christmas with us and he even said that he wanted a good Christmas with his kids.

Those were his exact words but that was to be the last time any of us saw him again.

"At 2am on the morning of Christmas Eve, the police came round to tell us that Garry had died of an overdose the night before at about 10pm. I went to identify the body."

Joan asks: "How many more young people will die? People who do drugs test your patience so much and in the end you stop caring and loving and all that is left is the guilt.

"What I have found hardest to deal with is the fact that your kids are not supposed to go before you.

"My Garry was on drugs for six years. For three years he was smoking heroin and for another three he was injecting too. But his death came soon after he started taking medication.

"I've been to conferences and I've heard that even in rehab centres where addicts are looked after 24 hours a day, that they are not 'clean' and yet my Garry was sent out with medication and drugs. I feel angry about that."

At one packed seminar organised to discuss the drugs problem, Joan, who is gentle and unassuming in the flesh, gave a moving account of her son's addiction to heroin. She made a plea to families not to give up on their children but acknowledged the difficulty of living with an addict.

"No-one really knows how to deal with people on drugs and it's so easy to give up on them. I was told to ring the police if my son came round for money. But how could I do that?

"What I want to do now is organise a memorial for people who've suffered like Garry, who have been ignored."

She added: "I don't want anyone who died of heroin to be forgotten. It is seen as shameful and people don't want to talk about it.

"It's for the parent who think it will never happen to them and then it does. You don't get the chance to say goodbye. The problem is that no-one really knows what to do, or how to deal with the situation.

"Some people give up on their children but I couldn't do that.

"People used to say to me, oh, he doesn't need his mother, what are you doing going to all these meetings with him? But I had to do what I could and help him in any way.

"I don't know what Christmas will be like one year on, but I do think it's time to say goodbye properly."

If you would like to get in touch with Joan regarding the memorial, contact her on (01274) 656125.

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