On the 3rd of March this year, Marcus Fair, the Founder of Eternal Media, received his New Years Honours MBE for Services to Addiction Recovery, to Ex-offenders and Tackling Homelessness. A wonderful day for Marcus… and for Recovery! Here is the first part of Marcus’s Story. He has been in recovery since 2014.
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I was very committed as an addict. However, the longer I go on in my recovery, the more I realise that my addiction had nothing to do with drugs per se. It was a symptom of the disease of obsession. I see this obsession during my youth, be it for sweet foods or chocolate, computer games, or playing on arcade fruit machines. I didn’t have an off-switch. Whatever I enjoyed, I kicked the arse out of!
In my third or fourth year at junior school, I won a raffle and received a digital watch and a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry as prizes. My dad got the watch, while I went to the toilet, pulled the cork out of the bottle, and ‘glugged’ all the sherry back! My family had to break into the toilet to get me out.
In my early teenage years at a comprehensive school in Middlewich, Cheshire, the really cool kids were the ones who were always getting into trouble. They were also the ones who appeared to be having the most fun. I didn’t possess their cool factor and certainly wasn’t having fun. I soon realised that the naughtier I became, the cooler I became. I rose up the cool ranks by climbing onto the school roof, setting off fire extinguishers, and being a pain in the arse to the teachers.
A hippie-looking woman in her mid-40s came to our school to give us a drug education lesson. She stood on the stage clutching her box of plastic drugs, from which she took out one after another, describing the dangers of using each. The continuing underlying message was, ‘If you do drugs, you will die’. We had heard the song ‘Just Say No’ to drugs, based on Nancy Reagan’s message in the US, on the TV series Grange Hill. However, us cool kids were just saying, ‘Yes!’ We wanted to get high, but we didn’t know where to get drugs.
Instead, we experimented with legal highs. My mates and I heard that smoking dried banana skins got you high. One lunchtime, we scraped out a banana skin and put the remnants on a plate in the microwave at my house. The skins turned to glue which we tried to smoke. No high there! We saw on the TV news that in Afghanistan opium oozed out of poppy heads when they were sliced open before they flower. We gathered poppies that grew by a local canal and sliced open their heads. A few days later, a brown gooey stuff had come out. We tried smoking this, but it didn’t do anything for us. It did smell of the perfume Opium though.
When I was 14, we were drinking in the park, smoking, and going to under-18s discos. I went with a friend to stay with his mum in a tenement block located in the outskirts of Edinburgh. When his mum went to work, she told us to do what we wanted, ‘but don’t go downstairs.’ Of course, we headed to the apartment below and told the guy there that we were told ‘not to come here, but we don’t know why.’ The bloke happened to be a local drug dealer and he asked if we’d ever had a ‘hot knife’. We were soon sampling smoke from weed that had been placed between two knives and was drawn into our body through a plastic pop bottle. We got high. I had tried a drug and it didn’t kill me!
We couldn’t find weed in Middlewich for quite a while after returning from Edinburgh. When we did find it, I soon became addicted to the drug. I was smoking it morning, noon and night. I then tried acid, which was an altogether different experience. I started going out with older mates to raves when the rave culture kicked off in places like Manchester. We used speed to keep us going through the night.
When Es (ecstasy) came along, we thought ‘we had landed’, as we had so much fun. We were really into the dance culture and travelled to clubs around the country. Our go-to locally was the amazing Shelley’s Laserdome in Stoke-on-Trent, which has been described as ‘the heart of the house and rave scene in the early 1990s.’
I was 17 years old and so naive. My mates and I would go for rave weekenders at Technodrome outside of Kilmarnock in Scotland. We would buy Es locally at £10 each and sell them up there for £25 each. Our profit paid for a hire car and for a whole weekend of amazing activities.
On one occasion, we arrived back in Middlewich at 03.00 only to have a police car slam to a halt in front of our car and another one behind. It was a well-planned ambush, probably arising because our dealer was pressurised by the police into giving them some names. One of my friends had not sold all his Es. In our naiveté, we quickly decided to divvy the tablets up, each having three, assuming that this would be passed off as ‘personal use.’
The judge threw the book at us! I was given a year sentence to Hindley Young Offenders institution, along with my mate Nath, even though it was our first offence.
Our cell at Hindley was freezing cold and often wet, as it had bars instead of windows. There was no rehabilitation culture in these institutions at the time, and our place was more violent than you could ever imagine. If you weren’t getting your head kicked in by lads from Liverpool or Manchester, you’d get it kicked in by a prison screw (officer). Jaws were broken by lads wielding socks containing large square batteries. Our cell was overlooking the institution hospital and we would regularly see a screw walking a lad with a blood-covered bandage on his arm to the hospital wing. Suicide attempts were made daily. Fortunately, we were eventually moved to another institution.
When we were arrested, the four of us lads agreed that we would never get into serious drugs like heroin. Two of my mates who were arrested with Nath and I were just over 21 and were sent to a normal prison for a year. They started using heroin there, unbeknownst to Nath and I. One evening, we turned up at their place unannounced and found them running something down a piece of foil. We guessed what it was, but they argued it was cannabis oil. I told Nath that it was time for us to go to the pub, but he said that we should have a try.
Now Nath was a grade A student. He was going places, already having a job lined up in a big chemical company. I was like, ‘Oh well, if Nath thinks it’s all right, then it can’t be too bad, can it? Nath has really got his head screwed on.’ Nath had a go. I had a go. Nath never tried heroin again. I continued for 23 years.
I didn’t enjoy that first experience. I felt rather nauseous, although I didn’t vomit. You’re probably wondering why I tried heroin again. At the time, we were still clubbing regularly, using speed and ecstasy during the night out. The experience left us needing some sort of come-down from the combination of drugs and pounding music. We would have come-down parties during which we smoked weed and/or took the benzodiazepine temazepam. However, the terrible feeling we had before and during these parties went on for hours and hours, far into Sunday. Then we’d go to the pub. On one occasion, I tried a few lines of heroin and found it was the perfect come-down, the perfect off-switch from the speed and Es experience.
We continued clubbing on Friday and Saturday nights and taking heroin to come down. Then we stopped going out on Friday night, but used heroin instead. We then stopped going out Saturday night as well. Sunday drinking then stopped. We were having heroin instead on both days. And then Monday as well… and then later and later into the week. Soon, it was heroin every day of the week.
One day, I didn’t see my mates for some reason. I felt poorly. I had the sniffles, my joints were hurting and I was sweating, despite feeling cold. I hadn’t felt like this before; it felt like a bad dose of flu. A friend came around and I had a line of heroin from him. All of a sudden I felt fine. My heart just sank as the penny dropped. ‘Oh my god, I’m addicted!’ I carried on using heroin.
It’s a cliche really. Me thinking, ‘It’ll never happen to me. Me and my mates, we’re not heroin addicts, we’re just clubbers and ravers that take a bit of heroin after the club. We’re not smack-heads getting dragged out of toilets and being homeless on the streets.’ And then we were addicted!
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Read Part 2 of Marcus’s Story tomorrow.
And all these years later:
