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EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 18 |
Jul-Aug 1999 |
Mark, not his real name, is in our project. He shares his thoughts with us.
I used to be a snooker player and I started getting into drugs, medication, alcohol which made it easier to train, things like that, you know. I was teaching people, then I started getting into hard drugs, heroin, and from there things just started to go downhill. My career started slipping. I started playing snooker when I was 12 years old. I was playing until I was 16, when I turned full time snooker player and I got an opportunity in Blackburn to go get a sponsor and everything. There were four of us. Slowly, we all went different ways, I ended up going abroad teaching snooker, another guy went abroad teaching snooker. The other two, ones a professional, the other got married.
I
was abroad teaching, at first kids and then really anybody, making quite
a lot of money out of it, moving around Europe. In Belgium, France,
Holland or Germany, wherever snooker took me. I had a good sponsor,
snooker was a full time job for me, I was making nearly £300- £400
a day, playing in tournaments, doing demos, exhibitions, and everything
to do with snooker. I also got a job doing tables, fitting them and
again making a lot of money, nice cars, nice house, nice everything. I
had been in snooker all of my life, it's just the last three years that
I haven't, because of the addiction which took me in a different
direction. I was 25 when things started getting out of hand. I started
drinking a lot, taking drugs, medication and then started taking heroin.
When I was younger I'd never heard much of heroin, nobody ever told me
what heroin was or anything about it at all. I got into it through
meeting a load of different people, it took the pressures away from
snooker, and then things slowly started getting worse. After a year or
two, I was just 'tooting' a little bit, you know just 'running' it, but
then I started getting into needles. From there things just went
downhill without me knowing. I wasn't looking the same, dressing
different, a bit smelly, everybody else noticed but it didn't matter to
me. Then I met a girl, we ended up living together, but heroin was just
ruling my life. Because she was a prostitute, she was out getting the
money so that we could supply the habit for both of us. After a few years of living with this girl, I started going a little bit mad, trying to come off heroin. I ended up three or four times in an institute were mental people are. I kept going in and out of those places, and a couple of rehabilitation centers abroad. They didn't work and I came back out of them. My girlfriend then got pregnant and I was still on heroin and tablets, methadone, all sorts of things. Whatever you could get abroad I would get it. I was 29, she was pregnant, she was having a little girl but the social security and the social services over there found out that I was on heroin, and they took our daughter away from us, which was not very easy. This carried on going and going, there was a lot of stupid things that I did. After our daughter was taken away, things got a little bit too much and I jumped from a 40 storey building trying to finish it all off.. I had lost my daughter ,my career ,snooker , everything. I had nothing left .All this because of my doings, I can't blame anybody, so I decided to finish it and jumped from the building ,but it didn't happen. I just smashed my feet which ended up in a couple of operations. They put plates and things in my feet.
My parents came abroad and saw that I was in a mess and decided to bring me back to England .I came back over to England over two years ago. I was in a wheelchair for six months and still had a lot of medication off the doctors, because I had to come off heroin at that time. After 7 months I started learning to walk again . After a month it wasn't too bad, I could get about and then I got a car. I saved up money for the car in the 7 months I'd been getting sick pay and the first thing I did was go straight back to heroin. I don't know why, I just suppose that after everything that had gone on, I had lost everything. I had almost my legs but I still went back to heroin. Therefore, I got back into heroin, ' tooting ' again just in a small way, not a big way, but it led to a lot of bigger ways. I couldn't supply ,I couldn't pay for my habit , you know , so I ended up working with some guys ,or you could say dealing. I suppose that I was paying for my habit, that's how I was getting my supply.
This went on for a long time, the police kept coming and busting and things were getting absolutely crazy . I had a nice house again ,I'd built a nice place up , but I was still married to heroin . Anyway, after a while the police kept coming and coming , completely wrecked my house through busting it so many times. I still hadn't seen that this was going the wrong way. I carried on , I suppose off my head. One day the police came and bust us, caught a large amount , took us into custody , then I realized this was not the way, you know . So we got put back into prison. There were quite a few of us who went down at that time , they all got bailed. I got out, what was the first thing I did again ? Back to heroin. I still had my house luckily. I had a lot of dealers on my back because I owed them money because of the busts . There were quite a lot of things going on . So I had been out of prison for a few weeks, still using a lot of medication. The police came again and bust me again and I tried to top myself one more time , which didn't work. Then I got out of the police cells and I remember walking up to my house and stood at the front door thinking ' have I to go in ? have I not to go in ?. I still had a lot of people after me and I decided not to go in , so I had nowhere to go . The day after, I went back to my place and realized that everything had gone, apart from the bed that was the only thing that was there. So I walked away from there, slept rough for a while, then I walked to the motorway. A lorry driver picked me up and here I am, starting afresh. It is lonely here in this part of Scotland
