list to get in after opening its doors a year and a half ago.

Today it is temporarily down to just two residents, The Royal Gazette has learned.

Government's Addiction Services, meanwhile, is understood to have 50 heroin addicts on the methadone programme.

Coordinator Mr. Bryant Richards could not be reached for comment but counsellors and medical officials expressed alarm last Christmas over increasing heroin use, especially among teenagers. Unable to afford the pricey drug, "junkies'' were going to the hospital emergency room with severe withdrawal symptoms.

Fair Havens programme director Mrs. Gloria Cholmondeley Mills yesterday conceded the ten-bed rehab was not full.

But she said it was not actually the case there were only two patients. "Some others are coming down this week,'' she said. "We are expecting about five.'' Fair Havens was also treating eight recovering female addicts on an out-patient basis, she said.

And it was expecting to be full again by summer.

The reason for the current fall in numbers was that it had just completed another of its ten-month programmes, she said.

Women addicts were also, as a result of the temptations of the festive season gone by, putting off seeking help, she believed.

"You don't go on a diet at Christmas-time,'' she explained. "Round about the holiday season we do not get a full house. The women are all partied out and afraid they might not make it.'' She added: "We get these periods every now and then. We've no real concerns about the numbers. They are fluctuating because it is winter.'' However, she did have concerns that community attitudes were holding back women from seeking help for drug addictions.

Mrs. Cholmondeley Mills said family constraints and strong negative influences of male friends were also factors.

"The women could use a little more help from the community,'' she said. Women with cocaine or heroin habits were putting off seeking help because they had no one to care for their children while they were in the ten-month programme, she noted.

The Victoria Street rehab allows children to visit but not to live in.

"Too often the public sits back and feels it's the individual's problem,'' she said.

"But they need to give women more encouragement to get into the programme.

The community -- their families and the general public need to stand behind them and give them moral support, because the problem affects us all.

"We need to talk about it and educate the public that drug and alcohol abuse is a disease -- the churches as well -- and that it is not a moral failure.

"Some families and members of the community feel let down and denigrated by having an addict among them but that is one of the things that works to lower the esteem of the individual.'' In October 1993, a few months after Fair Havens opened its doors in a "dream come true'' for a group of Christians and local women, its ten beds were taken and it had a waiting list of seven women while "hundreds'' of female addicts were reportedly making inquiries.

Fair Havens is part of the Council Partners, who are five anti-drugs groups that bonded together last year in a multi-million-dollar cash drive.

Having raised more than $2 million privately, the Council Partners took their five-year campaign public last autumn.

According to their mission statement, they aim to enable Fair Havens to initially rehabilitate 60 drug-dependent women.

The other drug-fighting charities involved include: the parents education group PRIDE, the Focus programme for the homeless, CADA and Lions Quest.