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it all started at school My name is Richard I'm a client of the Reconcile Project. |
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| My drug use
started at an early age, I was about thirteen. I started nicking off school
with the lads. There was a mate of mine who never used to go to school and his
mum didn’t mind, so we would sit around at his house all day and night and
get stoned. My behaviour started to deteriorate my parents and I were always at each other’s throats because I was stoned all the time. I left home at Sixteen and went to this hostel. I started taking Acid and I was overwhelmed by all the freedom at such a young age. I started hanging around with a mate of mine called Jimmy, we’d been out robbing and got a couple of stereos which we sold for £150. One of his mates came and said, ‘Do you want to get some Bags?’ I didn’t even know what a Bag was at that time. So, unknown to me it was heroin and I took it. He said at first that he didn’t want me to have any but I said I wanted some and that was it. I was living at a mate’s house at the time and I was in a difficult position. He was taking drugs and so that meant that I was taking them as well. We had an argument one-day and I moved out of his house. I hadn’t realised what a fix heroin had on me and that is when I experienced my first ‘rattle’. I went through the effects of ‘cold turkey’ and I didn’t even know what it was. You just think, ‘Wow, what’s wrong with me?’ From then my life progressed to bigger things. I started hanging around with people who were a lot older than I was, and I looked up to them as gangster figures, the drug dealers and that. I started being a ‘Joey’ for drug dealers, selling their drugs and that. That’s when I started injecting for the first time, my mates were doing it and I looked up to them so I started doing it. I was still robbing and burglaring and I never got caught until I was about eighteen. I got sent down for a breach of probation for six months. When you get a six-month sentence you do three months and it was hard. I had to do a rattle from injecting. I think that injecting is the worse part of heroin and it’s a worse rattle. If you smoke heroin it’s not as bad but if you inject it then it’s more intense. It brought my emotions out and everything; it was a terrible experience. It was like someone had picked me up and thrown me in this place and after I had done my rattle it was like, ‘Wow, where am I? God, I’m in prison!’ I asked for help a week before I got out. I said to this counsellor that I was having problems and I thought I was going to take ‘Gear’ when I got out. He told me that if I felt the need for that one Bag, just to get it out of my system, then do it and I did. I had twenty-five quid’s worth of Gear and I nearly went over. I couldn’t believe he gave me that advice. I had only been a couple of hours out of prison and I was back on the gear again. I started doing a lot of burglaries with this lad. I was doing two or three hours a night, even just getting handbags and that. It was crazy. I have had a fair few sentences since then, for burglaries and that. The last one I did was three years and nine months and I had to do twenty-four months out of it. That was a hard sentence, it was my biggest sentence and it was scary. Before I had been in juvenile prisons but this time I got put in a ‘con’s prison’ and that really opened my eyes. I was with grown men and I had to keep my head down and my nose clean. It was hard and there were a lot of drugs flying around. My girlfriend was bringing my Gear in on visits. Jail is a hard place and I don’t wish for anybody to go through that experience, the loneliness and the loss of freewill is hard. I don’t think I could ever go through that again. I heard about the T.H.O.M.A.S. Organisation while I was in jail this time. I wasn’t right sure about it but I came and it’s had some remarkable effects. I had been on heroin six years by now, I’m twenty-three and I didn’t want to end up as a forty year old junkie, living in a council house with about ten kids, I don’t want that. That’s why I came to the T.H.O.M.A.S. Organisation. I read Sean Curic’s articles in The Universe and I read about what goes on here so I came to see Father Jim and spoke to Steve who is now my key-worker and its gone on from there. |
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