  My name is Alex Burke. I started using drugs when I was about eleven. I started smoking cannabis just on the weekends when I used to go and join the older lads on a park near where I lived. Me and a few of my friends would go there and get one of the older lads to buy us a bottle of cider from the shop as we obviously didn’t look old enough to be buying beer. This is when I was introduced to cannabis, all the older lads knew me, as they were my sisters friends. When I first smoked it I thought it was great, I was one of the lads, never mind that it made me sick. I was in with the lads. After I smoked it a couple of times with ‘the lads’ I didn’t really do it much until I was thirteen but I was drinking at weekends with my friends as you do. Around when I was thirteen, I can’t really remember how it started, but me and a couple of my friends started putting money together and getting the smallest amount that you could buy. It went on like that for a few months until it got to the point where we were truanting from school everyday and smoking weed. From then on that was pretty much all we did to leaving school apart from attending now and then. I really do wish I’d have gone to school as I left with no qualifications whatsoever. It was when I was about fifteen that I started experimenting with temazepam and other drugs like LSD, amphetamine and valium, which sort of contributed to me not being interested in school. I thought things were great. I was with all my friends getting high and I was enjoying myself. I sort of let the fact go that I had truanted nearly all of my last three years of school and left with no GCSE’s. I was also not a bad football player too. I played in a Sunday league team and we were a good team but that all suffered because of me taking drugs. Things didn’t get any better when I left school. I was now sixteen with no direction in life and qualifications, and if I’m honest, I didn’t want to start working. So I had all this time on my hands with nothing to do; or I thought there was nothing to do because I was stoned all the time. It was around this time that I was introduced to heroin. I’d started smoking weed and taking temazepam, with quite a close friend, he was about five years older than me but I knew him as he was the son of one of my mum’s friends. I didn’t know that he had already had a problem with heroin and he asked me if I wanted to try it. He told me it wasn’t that bad, not like all the horror stories I’d heard and that you just smoked it on tin foil. So I tried it. The first time it made me feel quite ill and made me sick but at the same time it made me feel good, the boredom and depression of empty days and missing out at school were all gone. Well, for as long as I was using heroin. After using that first time I didn’t use for a couple of months. I carried on smoking cannabis everyday and occasionally using temazepam and valium, still with no direction and cannabis had started making me paranoid and depressed. There was only one thing I knew would help me not feel this way so I went and scored a bag and everything was ok until that had finished. I carried on using gear about three times a week for a while but I was soon using everyday and ended up being hooked. Because I had got a habit by the time I was seventeen and not working and not being old enough to get money from the dole I resorted to stealing and getting money from my mum. It wasn’t long before my mum knew something was wrong which was the most horrible thing in the world. It wasn’t enough to stop me and I gradually got worse and started stealing from home. I became a horrible person to live with and a horrible person to be around so I had to leave home. I was about seventeen and a half now and I had my own flat, which was ok, but it was just a place to sleep for me. By this time my stealing was out of control and I was caught for burglary and received a conditional discharge. I was lucky that it was my first offence and I was still a juvenile. Being caught didn’t stop me stealing and within two months of that I was sent to prison for six weeks for three counts of shoplifting. I had just turned eighteen and I was locked up for the first time. It was the worst thing I had been through that time coming off heroin cold turkey in aprison cell with nothing but four walls. I only served three weeks out of the six and no matter how bad it was it still wasn’t enough to stop me using when I came out. That was how powerful the addiction to heroin was. From that first time in prison when I was just turned eighteen and to now, being twentytwo, I have served seven prison sentences, each one getting longer every time. It took me until the last time I was in prison to seriously come to the decision that I didn’t want this life no more, if you can call heroin addiction and prison life. So when I eventually came to the decision I seeked help from the CARATS team in HMP Kirkham, I was allocated a drug worker and received a lot of help. The drug worker I was allocated was called Lynn Carter and she was very helpful as she knew how serious I was about getting my life back together and also getting my family back in my life as family should be. I talked about a place called the T.H.O.M.A.S. Project in Blackburn, Lancs which was a drug rehab with Lynn. It sounded like a good option for me to go on release. So when I was released I arrived at T.H.O.M.A.S. to start my rehabilitation and basically start my life again. That was on the 12th of July 2002 and now with the help of T.H.O.M.A.S. I am going to Plater College in Oxford to do a social administration course. I would never have thought it possible in the chaos of addiction but it is, I just wish I’d never had to go through the nightmare but I did. I would just like to say that no matter how bad things get you can turn things around, it’s never too late and there are people who will help as T.H.O.M.A.S. did for me. |
