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My neighbour is a heroin addict

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For about 5 years, someone has been stealing stuff from my backyard. A spade, a coffee mug that was left outside, a scarf off the line, the seat off my exercise bike (don’t ask!) – And then in December it suddenly became more serious.

The pool cleaner, 6 expensive towels, the battery from my car – all in a matter of a month or two. This was starting to cost me serious money.

Petty pilfering is unfortunately something we have come to expect in the course of our daily lives. I should never leave anything outside and I should have learnt this. But the battery and the pool cleaner?Show me someone who brings those things inside every night and I will show you someone who needs serious medical attention.

And then one night I spotted a face at my front window peering in. It was late and I was frightened. To cut a long story short, the armed response guys caught the intruder running down the street– largely because the square of fabric stuck to my fence spikes exactly matched the hole in his jeans. You try and explain that one.

He had been out on a scouting expedition for more loot in order to feed his heroin habit. The fact that the very large and bulky armed response guy had him by the collar of his shirt made the admission of guilt more readily forthcoming, no doubt.

I was ready to lay charges, until I found out it would mean nothing except a night in the cells – and there he goes. And furious with me to boot. What made me hesitate wasn’t just that – turns out he is the son of the neighbours and has lived behind me for 22 years.

When I moved in here he was still in nappies. That solved the mystery of how on earth the thief always knew when there was anything to steal in the backyard, and when I was out – he just looked over the wall.

So I spent more than R15 000 upping my security, changing my house into a suburban equivalent of Fort Knox. And threatened to lay a separate charge for each theft if anything goes missing again.

For six months all was quiet – and now small things have started to disappear off the line again. Heroin is a hard taskmaster, I take it. How he gets over the wall (8 feet high with nasty spikes) is anyone’s guess, but I suppose if you’re as high as a kite anything is possible.

So what now? I don’t know.

He’s 24, a complete addict who steals from the neighbours, and presumably terrorises his poor granny with whom he lives, and he has never worked. He hangs out with a dicey crowd and a picture of him has appeared on our Neighbourhood Watch Whatsapp group where someone called him the ‘neighbourhood bad boy’.

I doubt if his family can afford rehab, or if it would work, or whether he would want it to. Addiction is a tough nut to crack. Drugs are readily available more or less anywhere to anyone who wants them at low prices.

I feel sorry for him, but I hate being a victim of theft. So what now? Laying charges as I threatened to do (it’s been done by others against him to no avail), putting up electric fencing, moving elsewhere (and who knows who might be living next door?) or just making sure there is never anything at all to steal in the backyard? I just don’t know.

The problem is actually much wider than just my blemished insurance claim record: a culture of instant gratification that persists, addiction as a result of self-medication for a variety of mental health issues, gang activity and ineffective policing, the violence and crime that feed drug use, a lack of hope among the younger generation.

All I know is that I am not going to be able to solve any of these above-mentioned problems. Not today, anyway. What I do know is that my next set of towels will be from PEP stores and not Woolworths, and I am starting to read articles on how to introduce a Rottweiler puppy into a house with three adult cats.

And if I am forced to look on the bright side of life, as we so often are, he could have been on tik, in which case I might not have been writing this column at all.

Susan Erasmus is a freelance writer.

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