The Life of Alan

As Alan walks through the doors of the drop in centre he looks like any other confident young man with his spiked gelled hair, leather jacket and designer trainers. It’s not until you look at his face, and into his eyes, that you realise that the carefree attitude he displays to the outside world is a cloak to mask the anxiety and worry in his eyes.

As he settles in the chair opposite me I can see he’s quite nervous, as his eyes dart all over the room and his hands fidget with his hair. I try to reassure him that if any of my questions make him uncomfortable or uneasy, we can move on or even end the interview.

Alan has been clean from drugs for two years, one month and six days, as he proudly tells me, but each day is a conscious effort to stay that way. “I wake up fantasising on the carefree sensation that drugs gave me but, then I force myself to remember that I now have a job, and people who depend on me, so I can’t go back there,” he says.

Back there started 10 years ago when he was 13. “Cannabis was dead easy to get and all my mates smoked it and I didn’t want to be left out. I didn’t see any harm in it. Some kids drank alcohol, we smoked joints, no difference or at least I didn’t think so then. It was a way to chill out and I liked the feeling it gave me” So, what made him progress onto other drugs? “Curiosity mostly,” he says. “Someone offers you something to try and you don’t want to say no in front of your mates, you enjoy it, and before too long you’re hooked. LSD was my favourite, it just amplified all the good feelings but if you were in a bad space when you took it then it got a bit scary, like living in a horror movie. It was when I started taking heroine that everything started going down hill. Suddenly, I wasn’t in control any more. It took over my life, and all my waking thoughts were on getting my next fix. The final three years were a blur of highs and lows, where I was so desperate that I ended up selling to my mates just to fund my habit. Even now I’m ashamed at how far I had sunk.”

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I gently move him on from this sad era and I asked him about going into rehabilitation, and his recollection of when he decided he’d had enough. “I didn’t just wake up one morning and decide I needed help. For months, everyday, my only thoughts were how I could get money. I couldn’t hold down a job, I had sold everything of value, stole from my family and had no friends left. The worst part was I didn’t even like myself. I hated who I had become, but I still couldn’t do anything about it.” So how did he ...

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