EDGES MAGAZINE Issue

I started using drugs at the age of eleven just starting senior school. I started smoking cannabis until I was eighteen

Then I hit the nightclubs and started on cocaine and ecstasy tablets and alcohol until I was twenty-three. I started meddling with heroin on and off for about two years until the age of twenty-five. I picked up the heroin habit which I maintained until the age of twenty-eight. Three years of insanity and madness.

My worst moment was sitting on the couch with my mum watching a drug detox programme on the TV that she had made me watch. She told me that was the lengths it would lead to and I needed help. I had always wanted help but didn't know whom to ask. Every time I did ask I was always offered methadone and another interview, but there was no real help when I needed it.

I went to prison to get clean, I met a CARAT worker who talked about the T.H.O.M.A.S. programme, which I had never heard about. It all happened so quickly.Within seven days of talking to Robin the CARAT worker I was in T.H.O.M.A.S. I have been here seven weeks and things are looking positive. I have learned that I have a disease of addiction, which can't be cured, it's with me for life but it can be arrested. I'm learning the tools to cope with life.

Things have been a blur from the age of eleven to twenty-nine. Things have gone so fast because I have always had some mind/mood altering chemical inside me. Now there's hope and there are choices. I've never had choices.

I've never written so much in my life as I have since I came here; it's good, constructive writing and learning. I didn't realise what a bad person the drugs had made of me; yet in the middle of all the madness I thought things were okay and that I was in control, but I wasn't. I was a lost, desperately lonely person who shook himself off from society and in isolation. I came to realise that there is more to life, that there are options but you have to want those options and grab them with both hands when they are offered.

There are two doors at the moment - one to madness and one to happiness and every morning I am going through the happiness door. For the rest of my life.


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