<b>Family Become Heroin Addicts: A true Life story</b>

By our Colombo Correspondent

By our Colombo Correspondent. This is what a policemen who went on a raid, on a tip off, saw in a shanty home.

The middle-aged mother was lying on the ground, hooked.

The children, 11-year-old son Anura and 5-year-old daughter Vishaka, were inhaling heroin. Another one and a half year child was on the ground, gasping for breath.

Anura confessed: It’s our mother who taught us.

Every morning, brother and sister, goes to the Grandpass market to beg. Grandpass is a Colombo suburb.

“We return around noon with our collection and mother buys two food parcels and …,” Anura sobs.

Then the session starts.

“It’s from my husband I got the habit,” the mother wailed.

The husband, now in jail for possession of heroin, was a retail salesman.

“He burns it and inhales the smoke. I started as a passive smoker. Now… I cannot live without it.”

Anura said he too had become an addict.

Police took the family to the magistrate, who remanded the mother, sent Anura and Vishaka ( names are ficticious) to a Child Care Home and admitted the child at a hospital.