IT'S the most controversial movie to hit the cinema screens for a long time but for once the row is not about sex or violence. Trainspotting is a mesmerising British film about the lives of heroin addicts in Edinburgh.

It breaks the rule that Hollywood, and even Elstree, always knew about and usually observed that failure to condemn is to condone. That the rule is of doubtful validity has not saved Trainspotting (restricted to over 185) from attack though "saved" is the wrong word as the controversy will boost ticket sales.

The movie's detractors claim that it encourages impressionable young people to go out and start shooting up. This is because it manages to get an extraordinary number of laughs out of its dreadful subject matter and because it does not, overtly, condemn the use of heroin.

The fact that it is fast paced and exceptionally engaging no doubt also upsets its critics on the understandable grounds that heroin addiction should not be seen as an entertainment.

Yet the scenes it depicts are squalid, sometimes eye avertingly sickening, and the surroundings are of the sort which any sane person would want to avoid.

Indeed the sheer squalor of some of its settings are a feature of this movie. They include the worst pub toilet in Scotland and even Ireland cannot include a worse toilet than this one in which the anti hero, Renton, plunges his arms into a horrid toilet bowl to retrieve two opium suppositories which he has, er, evacuated into it.

The laughs generated by scenes like this are at the same time a tribute to the filmmaker's art and a major irritant to those who would have preferred a documentary from the Drug Squad.

Even the funeral of a man with AIDS is made to seem funny through the dialogue of two characters at the back of the chapel.

Disgraceful? Not really. First of all, we live in a society which doesn't give a damn about the deaths of people who get AIDS from sharing needles because the people in question are from the wrong side the invisible side of the tracks (imagine the uproar if nice, middle class kids could get HIV from Ecstasy).

Secondly, the character who dies is one of the few who, at the start of the film, seems to have his act together and to be entirely safe from the lure of heroin. When he makes the bad choice of trying heroin just once his inexorable decline begins and the decline is shocking. Even the jokes at the funeral are part of that decline.

But there are no laughs when the baby of addicted parents dies from neglect or a cot death it is not clear which and the mother's first need is for heroin to help her through. The lesson of that is not lost. Renton gives her the heroin too but he makes her wait until he has had a hit himself, and the lesson of that is not lost either.

Perhaps there are aspects to this film which are unrealistic. Renton seems to find it relatively easy to come off heroin. At one stage he takes heroin just a couple of times without falling hack into full time addiction.

And some of the characters are just too articulate for people who have screwed themselves up with this rotten drug. Indeed, Renton has a set of ideas for taking drugs which are bound up, in a curiously old fashioned, 1960s sort of way, with rejection of normal lifestyles such as having a mortgage and playing house.

At one point, too, Renton explains the pleasure of heroin by telling the audience to stake the best orgasm you've ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you'll still be no where close. That remark has been demned by the film's critics but it is spoken in a context of squalor which takes a good deal of the edge off it.

Indeed, throughout the film the passing pleasure which the addicts receive from their heroin is counteracted by the awful squalor in which they live.

It is hard to conceive of anyone in their, might mind who could watch this film and feel remotely tempted to take heroin.

Tony Geoghegan, drug/HIV counsellor, Merchant's Quay Project in Dublin:

THE hero was more articulate than most the drug users here. Those guys were not like people who come through our doors. But if the characters hadn't been funny or hadn't had banter, people wouldn't have come to the film.

When the characters detoxified in the film they didn't have any problems apart from taking drugs. But usually when you are detoxed, underlying issues come up about feeling anxiety, how they feel about the family and so on. I have worked in an agency in London as well and generally people when coming off drugs have other problems as well. Getting off drugs is easy. Staying off is the really hard bit.

The mother superior (the drug dealer, so called because of the length of his habit") was a bit benevolent.

The hero had never been in prison. There are very few people coming through downstairs who have not had a brush with prison.

The addicts in the film had friends who were not using drugs but in reality they wouldn't usually mix that much and I don't think they would be that accepted.

But I don't think it glamourised the drug scene. It did portray the hero in bits at times.

I would have a slight worry about the hero's statement that heroin is better than a thousand orgasms. That statement would stay with people.

I think it would make a very good training film for youth clubs. But I would be concerned about kids seeing it on their own without later discussing the points raised.

David, former heroin addict:

THE film was very enjoyable but there's a much more sinister side to being a drug addict than it shows, like the things you have to stoop so low to do to get money. It put a lot of emphasis on the pleasure of having a hit more than the downside of getting drugs, not having the money to score, getting strung out and all that. It's much harder work being a junkie than it shows.

It gets a lot worse than that film shows. I wouldn't have given up drug using at that point (the point at which Renton gives up drugs, with most of his relationships intact). I wouldn't have been ready. Most people have to lose everything first. I had lost everything.

My family didn't want to know me. Most addicts, nobody would want to know them anymore. If you were doing cold turkey you wouldn't have someone to lock you in your room and feed you (in the film Renton's parents lock him in his room and bring him food while he's going through withdrawal).

Cold turkey is horrible. It's indescribable. I thought the film captured it pretty well. It's like having a really bad flu but a thousand times worse. All your body functions you can't control.

If I was young again and into a punk type of scene I think it would be glamorous. If I was 16 or 20 years of age I would think it was a great cult movie.

I would say the film was a personal story of someone's addiction, maybe someone who got out of active addiction at an earlier stage. I know that it goes further from there. If I had only gone that far and stopped I wouldn't have been wiser about the shitty side. If we knew what was at the end of it we would have stayed clean. It didn't shown enough of that.

Rosaleen a mother of a former heroin addict:

I have sat through cold turkey and it's much distressing to look at than in the film. There wasn't enough on the psychological problems of people after detoxifying. It's like a bereavement, they have lost their job, they are redundant. What will they do with the time they used to spend going out robbing and scoring and all the rest? That didn't come across in the film.

Young people watching that could get the false impression that you could have a good time on heroin for a year and then go through withdrawal for a few days and then you are OK.

Also, in the film after Renton goes through cold turkey and is clean he takes a turn on (heroin) a couple of times as if it was OK to have the odd one, and that's not real.

I thought the dealer was more benevolent than in real life too. When Renton had an overdose in his flat, the dealer dragged him down the stairs and got him a taxi to hospital

I don't think I would like young people to see it and jest go off on their own and not discuss it with someone. It would be a very good film for youth clubs with a workshop afterwards.

The drug scene wasn't glamourised in it the squalid rooms and filth wouldn't entice anyone but it did make it all look easier than it is in reality.