Heroin is here, and it is here to stay. What we need is help. Ballymena's heroin habit was hard to quantify. Its consumption was clandestine by its very nature. Class A opiates were not paramilitaries traditional drug of choice, where rave drugs and cannabis were.
Police blame individual heroin addicts for dealing.
Some Channel 4 News spoke to had indeed transported heroin. In two cases at least, their cargo had a street value of tens of thousands of pounds - well beyond the purse of the average user. The paramilitaries shout loudly against drugs and they meat up punishments to certain dealers. But there were others, who were left alone. It seemed certain members of the paramilitaries were dealing heroin on a freelance basis.