Warning: Depictions of drug use Lisa used to be married. She had two jobs and was a mum to five kids. She calls it her normal life. Now there’s only one thing on her mind. It’s all Lisa has been thinking about since she woke up. Heroin.

Sitting in a friend’s house, she unwraps the foil carefully. “0.2g in weight, £10 in money,” she says, her eyes fixed on the brown powder. Reaching for a syringe, she wipes away a tear. Staring straight at the heroin, she admits: “I put it before my children.” We have no idea where Lisa got the money for her latest fix, or where she bought it from. We don’t ask. In complete silence she unwraps the foil, reveals the brown powder, and gets the syringe ready. Next the injection - she’s breathing heavily as the heroin courses through her veins.

After a while, her eyes drop. She has a moment in her own world. This is Lisa’s life. It’s the same routine day after day. And in a few hours, she’ll be searching for more. Lisa calls it “rattling” - the feeling she has without heroin. “Legs aching, body sweating, hallucinations, diarrhoea, sick.” And in that moment what does she need more than anything? “Brown powder to put everything right, automatic fix.”

The desperation never ends. Even with her prescription of methadone, which is supposed to be a longer-acting substitute for heroin, to help addicts stabilise, she still craves the real thing. Lisa’s life has been this way for 12 years, on and off. She shakes her head as she describes the panic of waking up every morning addicted to heroin.

It controls everything. Being an addict is a full-time job Lisa

“I think, 'Where am I going to find the money today to score?' Money to get a bag [of heroin] to get myself better.” “It controls everything, it controls every part of your day,” she says. “It is a disease, all of addiction is a disease.

“I said to the woman at the job centre I haven’t got time to get a job - being an addict is a full-time job. It’s ridiculous.” As Lisa talks she looks down, mumbles. Her face is hollow, gaunt - the effects of years of addiction. She describes how she ended up here. She faced violence and, struggling to cope, she turned to alcohol, heroin, and then the final despair.