At the height of her heroin addiction, Elizabeth turned to prostitution to support her habit. She made £200 a night and didn't run the same risk of being arrested as she would have had she been shoplifting.
Elizabeth is not the real name of the bright-eyed and articulate 27-year-old seated on a couch in a converted flat in one of Ballymun's grim grey tower blocks.
The flat houses a special Community Employment scheme, the Star Project, which offers education and training for women who have stabilised their drug use, normally with the substitute drug methadone. Elizabeth has just started the scheme, is off heroin and takes a low dosage of methadone. She says she is not ashamed of her past, but is optimistic about her future with her two young children and partner.
"It's great to get back into the workplace and stimulate your brain," she says.
The Star Project was one of the early initiatives of Ballymun's Local Drugs Task Force, one of 14 set up since the late 1990s following community agitation about the heroin problem.
The task forces involve representatives of communities and agencies including the Garda, welfare services and statutory drug agencies and receive Government funding for local initiatives.
Ballymun's task force has received funding for 16 projects including after-school clubs aimed at preventing children starting drugs, an early access programme for drug users and the appointment of a training and employment links officer for recovering addicts.
The Star Project places a heavy emphasis on personal and career development and participants can take NCVAs in training and communication skills and computers.
The women go on work placement and many have graduated to jobs or further education, according to the project's training manager, Ms Margaret Bowden.
The Ballymun Local Drugs Task Force's co-ordinator, Mr Hugh Greaves, says in the four years since it was set up the atmosphere in Ballymun has been transformed. Drugs were openly on sale through a pyramid-selling scheme where the dealers' commission was heroin. Today, the open dealing has stopped and people no longer feel under siege, he says.
According to the last count in 1998, there were 683 people using heroin or other opiates in the area, which has a population of 20,000. These included one in five men aged between 25 and 29 and one in 12 women. Mr Greaves is optimistic that the inter-agency approach of the task forces will continue to reap rewards under the new National Drugs Strategy.
"We could be looking at reducing the problem in the coming years," he says. "It's very bold to make that prediction because there has been a perception that, like the poor, drugs will always be with us."