What do you do when you discover one of your children has a serious drug habit? A new report highlights the effect addicts have on their families, writes Kitty Holland

David Smith, a single parent of three boys, had all the front windows of his home, in Ballyfermot, west Dublin, shot in by a local drug dealer in the past month.

The dealer, he says, was threatening his second oldest son because he owes him money. And he himself, in the past, has turned to alcohol and gambling - "to hide the shame and the guilt", of his three sons becoming serious drug users.

Anne Phelan, also from Ballyfermot, saw her older daughter develop serious heroin addiction when she was 15, and her older son do so when he was 16. She speaks of the "constant screaming and roaring" in the family home, the fear she was neglecting her younger children as she "dragged the two of them from clinic, to doctor to alternative therapist trying to save them".

"My mother had a stroke because she was that worried about them." Her marriage also broke down.

The details of the two families' experiences through a decade of drug abuse by adolescent children are different. Anne saw neither of her two imprisoned, for instance, while one of David's sons has been in prison on several occasions. For both, however, the impact of drug use has been devastating.

"Drugs just tear families apart," says Anne. "I don't think the effect ever goes away."

Her sentiments are echoed in a report to be published on Friday, The Impact of Drugs on Families. Written by social policy consultants Kieran McKeown and Grace Fitzgerald, the study was carried out in Ballyfermot in conjunction with the local support organisation, Ballyfermot Star (Support, Treatment, Aftercare and Rehabilitation), which counsels and advises drug users and their families.

Quoting the 1998 Commission on the Family, the authors set out from the premise that the "experience of family living is the single greatest influence on an individual's life and the family unit is a fundamental building block for society".

Ballyfermot Star, established in 1998, was one of the first groups in the country to state explicitly that the impact of drug abuse was not only on the addict but also their parents, brothers and sisters and extended family, such as grandparents. It also recognised that how the family was supported, or not, influenced the drug-user's recovery and whether younger siblings would also become drug abusers.

"The reality," says McKeown, "is that families who experience drug-related problems are often overlooked by policy-makers, service-providers, community activists and social researchers."

Anne describes the impact of living through the years when two of her children were abusing drugs as being "constantly in shock. You don't have time to try and take it in. I was all over the place. Sometimes I just didn't care."

And then there were days she'd sit with her teenage daughter, Kelly, and sing to her. "I'd tell her: 'I'll always love you but I hate what you're doing.' I'd say: 'When you're ready, put your hand out and mine will always be here for you'.

"By this stage, when she was about 18, she just had skin covering her bones, her hair was in bits - she just didn't care about herself anymore."

Kelly had been a pretty, bubbly girl and very particular about her appearance - "a little princess" - until she was 15.

"Then there was a change in her that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I knew something was wrong," says Anne now. Sitting in the family room in Ballyfermot Star, the sharp, quick-speaking woman says she sat her daughter down. "And I asked was there a problem, did someone touch her? She just told me she had been taking heroin, and I said 'Well, we'll make this better'."

Anne's own mother took Kelly to England for a holiday "to sort her out", and after that, says Anne, Kelly did "knuckle down for a bit".

However, contacts from the local Garda drug squad made it clear Kelly was still taking heroin. She organised through an agency for Kelly to work as an au pair in Germany, though that arrangement broke down after two weeks.

"I got her home and I brought her to doctors, to the Rutland centre [a private addiction treatment centre]. There was no information really, no help. We were just left on our own with it."

She says there were the constant rows with her husband - from whom she is now separated - over their differing attitudes to their children's addiction; there was the stealing by Kelly of her clothes, shoes and jewellery, to sell them to buy drugs and there was the fact her younger children witnessed more aggression and emotional upset than they should have.

David tells how he had been left by his wife in the year before his eldest son, then 13, began smoking cannabis.

"There were tell-tale signs - cigarette butts around the house, little holes on the lap of his trousers from burning ash. Small things were going missing from the house. But I didn't want to confront him.

"He started doing heroin, I think when he was about 15 or 16. I suppose at that time I didn't want to believe my son was taking heroin. There were fights with him and then the younger boys (aged 12 and 11) were shouting at him not to talk to their dad like that."

After he told the eldest to leave the family home, the younger two became involved in drugs. His eldest was homeless and ended up in prison "several times". He himself was drinking and gambling.

It was around this time he started to think about going to the family support centre at Ballyfermot Star. "I went along and stood outside wondering would I go in. Seven smokes later I went in. It was the biggest step I've ever taken in my life. The best step."

Until then, he says, he had never been contacted by any social service about his situation, not even by the Garda.

The report outlines the acute problems faced by families with drug users, being helped by Star. Almost one quarter (24 per cent) had a family member who had died due to drugs; more than two thirds (64 per cent) had a family member imprisoned due to drug use. "In terms of emotional well-being [family members] have much higher levels of negative emotion compared to the average Irish parent. The consequences of drug use do not pass quickly," say the authors.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the harm a drug user can do to the wellbeing of the family, they say, is that when the addict is imprisoned things often improve. "This may be due to the fact that imprisonment removes a family member who has been causing significant distress."

The study also examines the impact of drug abuse on the children of drug users, concluding addicts need particular supports with their parenting skills.

Both Anne and David speak of the "long, hard journey" they have been on over the past 10 years. David's oldest son is still a "chronic heroin addict", he says. He speaks of having had to "accept my son is on drugs" as being part of his personal recovery, while Anne says the "hardest thing I ever had to realise was that I couldn't save them". Her daughter has recovered and has her own children now, while her son, she suspects, may still be smoking cannabis, but no longer uses heroin.

"I had to realise this was something I couldn't fix. There is nothing you can do. If an addict doesn't want to recover, you cannot make them. At the end of the day it was the hardest thing - to let go, and begin recovering myself. I had to do that, though, for me and the rest of my family."

Names of families have been changed

The Impact Of Drugs On Families will be published at a conference on the issue, on Friday at the Ballyfermot Civic Centre