HEROIN addict Stephen Mall sleeps in Swindon car parks by night, and steals by day to fund his £200 a week habit.

Stephen, 20, is desperate to quit heroin but faces a six-month wait for treatment while the town's drug workers struggle to cope with the rise in addiction in the town.

He has little option but to go back to a life of drugs and crime and a Swindon underworld where addicts with the biggest habits beat and rob petty thieves in the struggle for cash to get a fix.

Today, Stephen's mother and stepfather appeal for help in ending what they say is a "desperate state of limbo" for addicts in the town.

To feed his craving for heroin, Stephen Mall has stolen from supermarkets and his employers, defrauded mobile phone companies, and borrowed and never returned money from friends who tried to help him.

He sleeps on the emergency stairs of Swindon's public car parks with fellow addicts, one of whom has stolen £4,000 from his parents' bank account.

He needs a bath and a change of clothes, and has switched to smoking heroin because counsellors warned him he risked losing his arm to gangrene if he carried on sticking a needle in it.

When we meet, he is sporting a huge lump on his cheekbone where a crack cocaine addict had tried that day to beat money for drugs out of him.

It's little wonder that Stephen wants to escape the world he lives in at the moment, and get off the drug that has ruined his young life and threatens to break his parents' hearts.

"Most of the people on drugs want to stop anyway," said Stephen, who insists he is not a bad person.

"But it's not easy when you are on the streets because there are always people about doing drugs.

"You think to yourself 'I'm going to stop', but you need to lie in bed for a few days to do that.

"You can't just do it living in a car park. It's the wrong conditions."

Stephen has little immediate prospect of getting the help he so badly needs. Swindon addicts like him face a wait of up to six months before they can be given treatment, such as a prescription for the heroin substitute methadone.

Being prescribed methadone is not a matter of just visiting your doctor and asking for a prescription.

Instead, addicts need to be rigorously assessed by a team of experts from groups like the Swindon Drug and Alcohol Team, which is currently struggling to cope with the sheer volume of drug problems in the town.

The team's clinical manager, Michael Robinson, says the treatment bottleneck is not caused by lack of finance, as he has just been given money to increase his counselling staff from 10 to 13.

"It's not so much the funding as the fact that the demand is very great out there," he said.

"Even if there were 100 of us, the heroin problem in Swindon is growing, and it's very difficult for us to keep up."

Stephen has reached 12th place on a waiting list to see local drug counsellors and, hopefully, get prescribed methadone.

But as an established, single addict, he could easily be displaced on the list by more urgent cases like drug users who are pregnant, or those with severe mental problems.

Stephen's mum and stepfather, Elaine and John Challinor, say addicts like their son "find themselves in a desperate state of limbo" while hanging around for treatment.

"We have tried and tried with him," said Mrs Challinor, 55, who moved from Stratton to Malmesbury a few months ago with her 54-year-old husband.

"We had him back home a couple of times, the last time was about six weeks ago.

"We took him out of Swindon and brought him to Malmesbury we thought that might help.

"We started to get him set up with a flat and the local doctors, to see if they could get Stephen on some kind of medication."

But any hope of a new start was shattered the day Stephen went into Chippenham to buy heroin and only returned after he had knowingly missed his doctor's appointment.

"It's that awful, awful, draw towards getting the drug," said Mrs Challinor.

"They know they are doing wrong, and they don't like doing it to people they know, but they can't help themselves.

"The priority is to get this fix so they don't suffer pain.

"He says he gets stomach cramps, he can't really walk properly, and is more or less incapacitated prior to getting a fix."

But it's not just Stephen who feels the pain of his addiction. For his parents, the pain of not being able to help him is unbearable, too.

"For a long, long time I would rush to his aid and protect him," Mrs Challinor said. "Then, although you still love them, you gradually have to lengthen the rope, almost cut off from them.

"It involves a lot of anguish and guilt, feeling you should do something.

"We've come to the conclusion that although he loves us he's usually after something. On the surface it's a bath or a meal, but then it becomes a fiver for cigarettes.

"Someone gives him a couple of quid, then someone else, and he's got enough to buy £10 of heroin.

"I love him ringing up, but at the same time my heart sinks, because I know it's going to mean conflict.

"I've got to say no to him, and it's awful."

The Challinors say they would even pay for Stephen's heroin themselves if they knew he was safe and going to get treatment soon.

"If the problem could be solved in a week or two we would, but there's no way that the addiction can be funded," said Mr Challinor.

"There's no help out there. It's absolutely dire. It's chronic.

"We see him brighten up when he's under the influence of the drug, but when he's coming out of it, I know he's crumpled up inside.

"But you can't keep shelling money out to paper over the cracks."

So Stephen goes on thieving, and sleeping in car parks under blankets borrowed from the Salvation Army, and having 'ideas' of his own about how he can get off the drug.

This gentle and loving son has even thought seriously of getting sent to prison for quicker treatment, but he doesn't want to commit the more serious crimes that would guarantee him a place in jail.

Instead, Stephen sees Oxford where addicts say they receive their methadone 'script' in just 10 days as a potential solution to his problems.

When we parted, his mum was going to drive him to the city and another new start a welcome move away from the sinister 'crackhead' who gave him his swollen face.

"I'm not a bad person. But I was stupid enough to do it," Stephen says of the day he first took heroin. "I had a choice. I've got a brain.

"I'm never hopeless. I don't get depressed or anything because there are certain things you can do.

"If you go to Oxford, you only have to wait 10 days for a methadone script.

"That's all I've got to wait."