EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 24

January 2001

CRIME AND DRUGS... they're not worth it

PhillippePhilippe is one of our clients in our residential projects.

Over the past few years I have been involved in crime and drugs on a big scale. I have now started to sort my life out. I'm in the rehab unit belonging to the T.H.O.M.A.S. Organisation.

I feel a lot better within my self and better equipped to deal with life situations. I'm not being complacent and I know there is a long way to go but I have started on my own personal journey.

My drug addiction started as a young boy, experimenting with cannabis from the age of eleven . Then, a round the age of fourteen, I progressed on to things like ecstasy and cocaine. I stuck at that for about fifteen years. Then I progressed on to the really hard stuff, heroin and crack. I became not only mentally addicted but physically addicted as well, that’s when my life really fell to pieces.

I had an extremely hard childhood and I felt very isolated. My self-esteem was non- existent. I thought the only way I could combat this was by using mind-altering substances. When I was using ecstasy at a young age I found that it improved my self-confidence and I was able to interact with people a lot easier, but really I was kidding my self . I started to get feelings of paranoia and isolation. I wasn’t fitting in and my friends we re beginning to shun me. When I couldn’t handle it any more I moved on to heroin which totally suppressed all my feelings . Heroin helped me to escape into a different world . It’s all changing for the better now, at last.

Drug abuse was also an escape from many other problems that I had experienced through later years in my life. When I joined the army and went to Northern Ireland I used drugs to suppress my emotions. All through my life I have run away from my problems and drugs we re a natural way for me. I now know that that was crazy and false. Eventually, the drugs served no purpose except to heighten the feelings of anxiety and paranoia, to such an extent that I became totally detached from normality.

I have discovered myself again during my time in the Reconcile Project . I have discovered a whole new meaning to life, no longer is it artificially induced. I can now determine and choose my own way of life. I never thought I would have been able to do this but T. H . O. M . A . S . has helped me. For the first time in 31 years of my life I now feel comfortable and able to cope. It has provided me with a safe and warm enviroment , a cocoon so to speak, like a mother would do with a young child. She would protect her child as well as nurture him and let him develop in his own way. I feel like a naked child that has just been born into the world and I have chance to start again

T. H . O. M . A . S . has been like a mother to me. I have never had much of a family life and T. H . O. M . A . S . has given me a purpose, it has given me that safe and warm enviroment . It has enabled me to give something back to myself and move on, to realise not only where I am from but where I am now as well . I feel now that I am ready to fly into the world . The T. H . O. M . A . S . Organisation has also given me many avenues to explore, further education, work and basically many more choices than what I have given myself over the last ten years of my using life. I now feel capable of re-integrating myself into society. I have always been a very independent person, one who had to deal with things himself. I always thought that I was ‘alright Jack’ but now I have been educated so to speak in a way that it’s not only me that matters, everybody else matters.

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THOMAS is an integral part of Catholic Welfare Societies, Registered Charity number 503102