 Steve is now 26 and is undergoing Rehabilitation in our Project. I started to take drugs when I was eleven. I was taking magic mushrooms, smoking cannabis and taking acid. My school life was bad. I didn't get on with the teachers and I got thrown out of school for dealing cannabis at the age of thirteen. I was asked to leave even though they didn't find any drugs on me. The brought my parents in and said that they didn't want me in school anymore. My education stopped there. I got a home tutor for a bit but that didn't work out. After this I had to go to college because no school would take me. I was arrested for dealing in the Vulcan pub at fifteen and I got a caution for that. It was downhill from there really. I went from a normal teenage lad and turned into a punk. I shaved my hair into a Mohican style and got some tattoos. I started hanging around with some like minded lads but they all sacked me off after I started to take heroin. Life as a punk were the best days of my life. At fourteen I could get served in pubs because of the way I looked with tattoos and that. So at weekends I weren't hanging around with lads of my own age, I was hanging around with lads twice my age. I would go over to Manchester and one day of the year all the punks from around the country would meet up at this pub and we would have one big party. It was all peaceful, there wasn't any racism or anything. This period of my life lasted for a good four or five years. My dad then paid me to change. He gave me two hundred pounds to go out and get some nice clothes. I took the money and bought myself a pair of trainers and jeans. When I was fourteen I started buying amphetamine. I was taking a lot of that at weekend and even during the week. I started work at fifteen and worked for a hardware firm. I left there to go working at a butchers in Great Harwood. I loved that job. At the age of eighteen I started working in a slaughter house. That involved killing animals, cutting there throats etc. I was fascinated with death. I didn't have a conscience. I had no morals so I didn't think about anybody else but myself. Death didn't bother me because I didn't care about life. When I started taking heroin at first it was for the buzz, but then it got out of control. I was sharing needles with people on purpose because I was down on life at the time and I didn't want to live anymore, but I didn't have the bottle to commit suicide. That's a humiliating experience - the fact that you want to die but you don't have the bottle to do it. So I thought I could get a dodgy illness from someone else's needle and just die. It was an easy way out, but that never happened. I overdosed eleven times and ended up in hospital. One of the first times my mum came into work, she's a nurse, and she opened the door to a ward and I was there wired up to a monitor. She couldn't believe it. Every time I walked away from the hospital I thought, 'Better luck next time.' I believed that after death you do go somewhere else and I just wanted a better life than what I had, an easier life. It didn't help working in the slaughter house I don't think, killing animals all the time and laughing about it. It wasn't about being cruel to them, it was just enjoying the job. I loved death and I wanted it more than anything. Every time I went over I was with somebody and the medics turned up, gave me an adrenaline injection and brought me back each time. Even the paramedics got to know me as they had been out for me that many times. I wasn't bothered about anything really. I then realised what I was doing to myself. It was my dealer who put me in touch with Pam, one of the worker's at T.H.O.M.A.S.. He told me that he was sick of seeing my face. I rang Pam up and started coming to the Drug Support Group on a Tuesday, listening to what people had to say. Listening to the stories in the Tuesday Group made me realise that I haven't had it so bad compared to what I heard in there. That's when I started looking at life different really. I began to do my best to get off drugs. I have two older brothers, one is working away in Holland and I don't see him anymore. At eighteen he went to Spain and worked there for seven years. He came back for a few months and then went away to work in Holland. We were pretty close when we were kids but when I started taking drugs he didn't want to know me. I didn't get on with my other brother, I didn't like him at all. I hated him sometimes but now he would do anything for me. I have done some bad things to my parents. I've stolen off them, the first time being when I was seven years old. The things that I took off my mum I never sold, I always pawned it and made sure I got it back before she found out. The first day I came into the Reconcile project was the first time I couldn't get her jewellery back. That knocked me for six. When you are taking heroin and you steal you don't think about the consequences. It when you get your mind back, when you've gone through your withdrawal and your brain starts working again that it hits you. Things come up from the past that you've done. It's a full time job being clean, life is a full time job at the moment. When I am here some days and I see the door open I think, 'Nobody is going to keep me here if I want to leave.' But I just want to be clean at the moment. That's all that matters to me at the moment. I'm tired of thinking because once you have sorted one thing out, something else comes along. But that's life and I never thought that it was going to be easy. The most positive person in my life is Naomi, my daughter, she's nine. I split up with her mother about two days after she was born. I didn't see her for years and then one day, about three years later, she walked through my door and we got back together. It didn't work out. We were just incompatible. I have carried on seeing my daughter. She's got a step dad as well, so we are more like brother and sister than father and daughter, which I think is a lot better. I need to get clean for myself because one day the ambulance will not get there on time. I want to live now and do something with my life. |
