EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 36

March 2004

 
I lost everything to Heroin

My name is Daniel I am 27. My drug use started about 8 years ago with class A drugs in Holland, using lots of cocaine and then getting heavily involved with people who were involved with smuggling and stuff like that. Bringing it back to England smuggling, people using firearms things like that. I just thought it was all fun. To me it was all fun. None of my family knew anything of what was going on. Then I was introduced to heroin and that’s when things really started to go downhill you know. Loss of job, girl friend, car, home, everything or at least what I thought was everything.

I came back to Britain and all the family found out what was going on. Before I knew it I was stealing from my family, I was manipulating them, fighting with them, attacking family, taking things out of my gran’s house. I was arrested for fighting with my mam’s boyfriend, driving cars I shouldn’t have been driving, no road licence no tax, nothing like that, I just went completely mad with it.

When I was growing up and my parents broke up and my dad went back to live abroad I was moving backwards and forwards between them, and there was never any stability in my life. When I was in Blackburn I started off at St. Anne’s school and when my parents were in pubs I was always at my Grandma’s or with another family member or on my own. As a child when my parents split up I felt as though because my father moved far away they never had anything good to say about each other and I felt they were playing each other using me as a pawn so to speak and I began to detest the pair of them. I hated them both until I was about 15 even younger 13 and I wanted to do everything they didn’t want me to do. I wouldn’t do anything even if I wanted to do something I wouldn’t do it just to prove a point that I could be naughty.

I used to steal, be anti-social from the start of the day till the end of the day and it was just good fun to me. I was in trouble at school, so they told me to get out and not come back. I didn’t go to any school and I ended up with no exams. But that was it as far as I was concerned, I was happy to be out and free. I managed to get a job but I was always late for work, and I suppose I carried on with my school attitude as I did at work you know, but I managed to keep a job for a couple of years. I was an apprentice engineer. I managed to get some qualifications, but as soon as I was nineteen I left the country.

The first time I left the country I went to Gran Canaria selling Timeshare, and when I arrived it was full of people with forged passports and ex-cons and I was only 19 and I was a bit naïve at the time. I was only a kid really and I thought it was great, all these bad people. I learnt to get on with them, I just wanted to be something I wasn’t, a bit of a Jack the Lad and it was the start of a rocky ride really. That didn’t last long and I came back to Britain. Straightaway I went to London for about two months and I managed to get a job. While I was in London I managed to get a job in Holland and I went over to Holland where I remained for about six years and in that time I got involved with all kinds of crime, smuggling, messing with cocaine and people bringing hash from other countries and arranging with people to sort it out in England. All these guys were older than me, a lot older than me and I was in it above my head and it all went sour. When I first arrived in Holland I had a job in Eindhoven and things were alright for a bit. I was there for several months working for Daf trucks and machines, got to know a few people, got involved with cocaine heavily, using lots everyday because it was so cheap. This went on for quite some time and I tried to stop but that only lasted for about six weeks and as soon as I started using cocaine again, heroin came along, they certainly complemented each other perfectly, one kept me awake and the other sent me to sleep. I needed and used both every day in vast quantities, because they were so cheap and so readily available and I was making good money. I’d bring it back to England selling it all and I thought I was doing alright at the time being a Jack the Lad making quite a bit of money. That didn’t last and when the drugs got a real grip on me specially the heroin, I kept going from job to job and none of them lasted more than two or three weeks. They kept finding me fast asleep in toilets, drugs in my locker and all that and I just got a name among the British agencies in Holland, you know, don’t give him a job he’ll have all your employees on drugs before the week’s out. I had to come back to Britain, and when I was in Britain I started injecting and everything was so expensive and I didn’t have the money to do it any more. I still had debts and problems in Holland, loose ends that I haven’t tied up. I still have a car sitting in a garage in Holland. I’ve still got credit card bills in Holland about £20000 and I’m going to be paying for this for a long time but it’s all due to drug use.

I came back to Britain and came to live with my grandmother. Everyone hated me being there, all the family, they didn’t know what was going on and when they found out they really hated me being there, they wouldn’t talk to me they wouldn’t come round unless I wasn’t there. Then it just progressed into me stealing and manipulating, fighting with family members and things going missing and it was me who was doing it, everyone knew it was me but I denied it until I was blue in the face, I even convinced myself that it wasn’t me. Through my lies I caused a lot of hurt and pain there, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

Then my grandma got cancer and she began to die very quickly, she only lasted about three months. By this time there were certain family members who were frightened of me they wouldn’t come near me because of my temper, because of the way I was with them. So they wouldn’t let my grandma home from hospital because they knew I was living with her and I was a drug addict. They wouldn’t send any nurses round with morphine, so that’s my fault that my grandma didn’t get to spend the last few days in her own home. My grandma is now dead and I wish I could change that but I can’t and I do feel bad about that and it was all my fault and it’s never going to go away, I’m always going to feel bad about it.

I think my grandma was the person I felt closest to in my life, as a child it seems the only place I felt safe was at my grandma’s and I still feel it to this day. Until she died I felt that way and with my grandma taking me into her house it seemed that the family, my aunties and uncles they hated me and I don’t blame them but they then started causing a few feuds with my grandma, she was sort of saying ‘well he’s my grandson and I’ll look after him’. So the fact that I was there was a problem because of what I was doing. I did bad things to my grandma, I took money out of her purse and to protect me she didn’t tell all the family members because she knew they’d just come and throw me out. She didn’t want to see that happen to me and I suppose I knew that and she was an easy target you know. When my grandma died I just started on other people, I started on my mam, whoever was closest to me, whoever was the easiest target. I knew my grandma had left my mam some money and I started manipulating all that out of her. Now she’s gone, she died in April of this year and that’s when I first heard about THOMAS. The rest of the family let me stay in my grandma’s house but that was only because she had asked them to or else I would have been out on the street, I couldn’t go to my mam’s I’d nowhere else to go. I’d no friends left, or the one’s I did have were heroin users. My family said if this thing with THOMAS doesn’t work out they’re going to kick me out.

Luckily I’m here now and I’m doing my best to get my life back. Since I’ve been here I’ve realised I’m not the only person who has made mistakes, because being a drug addict is a very lonely place to be, you feel that all the world’s against you and it’s you that’s the problem, it’s you that needs to change not the rest of the world. Since being here I’ve learned a lot about myself. My personality has come back a bit, my feelings, my sense of humour. There is a life, I knew that drugs where going to kill me and I wasn’t really bothered, I knew that I was going to die pretty young, none of this really bothered me because life wasn’t worth living anyway. Now I think about it I just realise how insane drugs must have made me to think in such a way. Now I’m here I’ve been here 5 weeks now, and it’s been the best five weeks and the best thing I’ve done since picking up Class A drugs. Hopefully I can turn my life around and do a lot better for myself than I have been doing in these last few years. For the future after THOMAS I think I’m going to spend some time with my family in Italy and then I’m going to go to college to do an I.T. course, get into computers, I’ve already done some work with CNC so I’d like to do that. As I said earlier about my grandma, I know she’s looking down on me, she’s the person that gives me faith, because I remember a lot of things that she said to me. She’s my higher power and the person I still look up to and think a lot of and the person I pray to at night, the one who will always remain very special to me I know she’ll forgive me, she was always the first one to forgive me and I know that keeps me going.
 
   

left arrowback button right arrow


This Document maintained courtesy of BS Web Services
. Material Copyright © 1997-2004 THOMAS (Those on the Margins of a Society)
Registered Charity Number 1089078