I was soon paying £20-40 a day just to feel normal in the morning. Initially, I paid for my drug use with the money I received from working for my father, but this situation changed when I started to use more drug as tolerance developed to its effects. Heroin is a very honest drug. With alcohol, it’s a disease that will tell you that you haven’t got it. You can go for years being in denial. But with heroin, you know you’re f…ed. By the age of 21, I had written myself off. ‘This is my life now, this is what’s down for me.’
I eventually decided to go for some help. And, believe it or not, the hippy lady who came to my school became my drug counsellor. At the same time, a pharmacist started packing me off each week with a litre of methadone. This was the time before you had to do a daily methadone pickup from the chemist.
I’ve never understood why seemingly intelligent people like doctors would give me ‘their’ drug instead of ‘my’ drug when their drug was way worse than my drug. Their drug was this horrible green sticky chemical that took over my life just as much as heroin took it over. It also destroyed my bones and my teeth, and prolonged my agony. I know methadone helps a lot of people, but it had an insidious impact on me. And I continued using heroin after being prescribed methadone. And then I gave up the methadone.
Homelessness came in quite quickly—I was living in sheds and vehicles, until real homelessness kicked in. Crack cocaine followed, which led to me committing burglaries. In my opinion, crack is designed to give you no genuine satisfaction. There’s no point where you think, ‘You know what, I’ve had enough.’ The high is very high, but also very short-lived, so you just want more. The things I’d do to get crack were worse than what I would do to get heroin. Injecting the drugs came next. Luckily, I didn’t contract any blood-borne viruses from injecting, which I know was down to me being too selfish to share.
For year after year, I was just looking like a skull on a stick. Eating every three days, if I remembered, and if I could get into the local garage to rob something. I’d travel around the country buying heroin. I used to wear out towns rather quickly because of the amount of crime in which I was involved. I had to keep moving on. I didn’t access any treatment because you had to wait at least six weeks to see anyone. And if I was in a place long enough, they’d want give me methadone. If I started taking the prescribed drug, I’d soon come off it because of its insidious effects.
My life in the depths of addiction was utter distilled misery. The bad things I experienced, which gradually crept up on me over time, were worse than anything I saw in the film Trainspotting. I was stabbed, shot at, kidnapped several times—police spotter planes were looking for me on one occasion—and I had the absolute living shit kicked out of me. Looking for somewhere to sleep, hospital visits, and being nicked by the police just became part of the day.
I overdosed multiple times and actually died twice, but was revived with Narcan (naloxone) by paramedics. I wasn’t very happy about being revived. On occasion, I overdosed deliberately. However, I was too chicken to jump off a bridge or slit my wrists to end it all.
I didn’t go without drugs very often, as I was very good at finding where to get them… and the money required to buy them. For some of my mates, if they couldn’t get their drug, they would have a bottle of whiskey instead. That wasn’t good enough for me. I wouldn’t stop looking for the drug until I found it, travelling afar if needed. My life was all about getting the drug and finding somewhere to do it.
My using was very solitary. I wouldn’t say lonely, as I had heroin. I didn’t need friends. I possessed just two emotions: happy (got heroin) and unhappy (not got heroin).
As for my family, I didn’t want them to see me, because my using was so embarrassing and shameful. I can’t imagine what they must have been thinking. They must have gone through disappointment, disbelief, frustration, and absolute panic not wanting this to be happening to their son. There would be massive periods of my life where I would go missing, thinking I was protecting my family by not letting them see how bad things were. I undoubtedly amplified their concerns, with them not knowing what was going on and thinking the worst.
What was my rock bottom? It was every morning! I would lie there when I came around in ‘bed’, wherever that might be, on a mate’s sofa or in a car park, and experience a heart-sinking feeling, an overwhelming despair, even before opening my eyes. ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to do everything that I did yesterday again today.’ And that’s the horrible thing about a serious drug addiction. It’s the same thing, the same crime, the same people, doing the same desperate things living the way you do. It’s like Groundhog Day. When I was ‘asleep’ after taking heroin… that was the place I wanted to be.
The general view of addicts is that we are dropouts. We are lazy failures, and all the rest of it. However, I was very busy being an addict. I never had a day off. I didn’t have a sick day, a holiday, a birthday, or Christmas Day. I was an addict every day. And I had to continually be creative to survive on the streets and keep getting my drugs.
You might ask, ‘Why couldn’t you change?’ I wasn’t aware that I could change, that there was a way out. I wanted to be clean every day. But there was always the fear of cold turkey. And even if you did manage to go cold turkey, what do you do after that? I started to try and make some form of change, out of desperation and pain. Whilst I believe that pain is a great instigator of change, my problem was that I had a very high pain threshold. I still have holes and tracks all over me, and I nearly lost a leg twice. At one stage, doctors wanted to put a stent into my heart to keep me alive.
At the end of my using, I was injecting a cocktail of heroin and crack cocaine in the same needle (a snowball) that was so thick it was like tar. If my eyes weren’t rolling in the back of my head and I was having like a seizure—and I’m not epileptic—I would think that I’ve got ripped off by the dealer. There wasn’t really anywhere else for me to go.
…..
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! You can read more of his Story early next week.
Please note that the photograph is not of Marcus. It was one I found online from Northern Healthcare.