All are concerned that the habit will spread to their other children.Monza Ahmed says the biggest problem for the borough's fight against drugs is the lack of employment training and other facilities for young people. For these women simply attending meetings takes great courage, so strong is the sense of shame. Maleka Begum, a 38-year-old mother of five, is one of the group's members. She swings from tears to anger as she recounts, through an interpreter, experiences with her heroin- addicted 20-year-old son.
She has sold her jewellery to pay his debts and protect him from dealers' violence. "Over there heroin is cheap and pure so the kids are laughing. They just come back and start selling it here," explains Kieran Burke, leader of the Tower Hamlets Community Drugs Team.A pilot project was set up recently in Shadwell to help Bangladeshi mothers whose children are using the drug - but the group is struggling to secure permanent funding. The problem is that Bangladesh, which shares a long border with Burma, part of the notorious drug-cultivating "golden triangle", has changed since the parents left and top-quality heroin is now widely available there too. Many parents have resorted to locking their children up and forcing them through cold turkey, or "clucking" as it is known on the street.Drug workers report that some parents are making matters worse by sending their children back to Bangladesh in desperation. "It is really difficult to talk about in our culture because if only one person is on it, then the whole family is shamed," says 15-year-old Hussain Uddin, who lives on the Ocean Estate. Gazing out from a window at the top of the stairwell we watch customers coming and going from the ground-floor flat, as children play only yards away.
The heroin epidemic is also apparent in the faces of the Bangladeshi boys hanging around outside. Some are too young for acne yet their skin is covered in tiny pimples brought on by smoking the drug Their expressions are glazed. They are, as Charlie puts it, "off their faces".It is difficult to get white parents to talk on the record about their children's drug problems, or even to admit there is a problem at all In many Bangladeshi homes, the taboo is even stronger. Evidence of heroin-use - in the form of burnt pieces of tin foil - is scattered on the stairs; there seems to be more of it the higher you climb.
A dealer in Bengal House was arrested recently but Charlie points out the home of another supplier in the opposite block. The rally had been called by religious leaders who complain that Tower Hamlets council is preventing the mosque from buying an adjacent plot of land, currently used as a car park. They accuse the council's planning committee of racism in blocking their attempt to acquire the land from property developers by insisting that the developers stick to an agreement to build low-cost housing for single people on the site. (For its part, the local authority is, as one councillor put it, "cornered".
If it allows the mosque to have the old car park, it fears it will set a precedent by which property developers would be able to escape the current obligation to develop 20 per cent of any land they acquire for social- housing purposes.)Above all, the current row shows how priorities have shifted. It is, and always has been, a grim place - although the young people hanging round outside seem friendly enough. During the daytime the heavy metal doors of Bengal House are left open, so that children can come and go from the adjacent playground.Inside, the flats are situated on either side of a concrete staircase. Each one is fitted with an iron grille through which children and adolescent girls peer out. It has become the first drug many of them try," says Monza Ahmed, 25, a member of the Tower Hamlets Community Drugs Team "Before, older dealers had principles If a 14-year-old came up to them, they wouldn't serve them.