Debbie's Story

Debbie has memories of a good childhood. She lived with her parents, older brother and two younger sisters.

"I've got the best background anybody could ever have. I had everything, absolutely everything really…"

Debbie reflects on her school days as a happy time. Her social network of friends ranged from the school geeks to the in-crowd.

"I loved school… we used to have brilliant laughs, hell of a laugh in school. I wish I could go back and do it all again…"

"I've always been the one to be dared. I've always taken up my dare. I've always been the one what always wanted to do everything, you know?"

Disaster struck for Debbie when she was twelve years old. Her father had an affair that led to the breakdown of her parents' marriage. Debbie turned to drugs to help escape the reality of her parents' separation.

" I don't want to blame it on my father, but it's just that I was daddy's girl and once he did that to me, he betrayed my trust and that betrayed my trust in all men. So that's what I came to expect of men, basically."

"… so that's when I really started going off the rails - drinking and smoking dope and doing bottle bags and God knows what. So that's the beginning, basically."

"I've always known I've been the black sheep because when everybody tells you you're naughty, you start acting it then. I didn't only act naughty - I acted worse than naughty. But it's what I came to believe in, in the end."

Debbie also developed anorexia.

Although her father's infidelity had a significant impact on her, Debbie does not hold her family responsible for her drug taking. She believes that she would have ended up taking drugs even without her family problems.

"It's nothing to do with my family why I take drugs. I turned to drugs because I turned to drugs."

Debbie's drug of choice depended on the people she was hanging around with at the time.

"It was different drugs in different places."

"… I just kept on moving every six weeks to six months. I just kept on moving about so I got into different gangs and groups of people but I always use to see the dealer, unknown to me at the time. I just thought he had a bit of money… and then people started wondering, you know, 'She's always going for the dealers' but it weren't that, it was just that I thought that I had to be seeing one of the boys to be able to hang around with the girls."

Debbie experimented with magic mushrooms and LSD when she was thirteen. Her drug use then progressed to speed and ecstasy. She also described herself as having a "bit of a valium problem" at this time.

"I think a big turning point for me was when I was 13, 14 maybe, when I started getting in to taking so much speed I was like a paranoid schizophrenic…"

By the age of 14, she was taking large amounts of diazepam a day. This anti-anxiety drug helped her deal with the "come-down" from the amphetamine and the paranoia produced by the stimulant.

The rave scene became very appealing to Debbie when she was 14. She started going to twelve-hour raves.

"I started taking speed a lot and pills. We started going to Helter Skelter… we'd take God knows how many pills and we'd buy them before hand because we bought some down there before and they gave us a really bad reaction… And like the thing was, it's not funny now but it used to be funny because… [a friend] would say 'Quick, quick! They're snorting another gram of powder. Quick, let's do two. Let's do two!' Yeah, we'd be fighting against each other - who does the most…"

A couple of weeks after Debbie started taking speed, the effects of the drug began to disappear, so she sought out "stronger" speed.

Debbie cannot remember the exact amount of drugs that she would typically consume during these twelve-hour raves. However, she can recall the amount she and her friends took before getting to a rave.

"We'd take a good three and a half grams [speed] before we even got in the car, that was for starters. Then when we got in the car, we'd put the music on and we'd start taking the pills. Coz we were bombing the speed in rizla… In the car we'd take about four pills… and as soon as we got on the bus then we'd start snorting [speed]."

"… we used to take valium and temazies to come down from going raving… I collapsed once when we came home, we'd been raving all day. I said 'I'm only going upstairs to freshen up and put lipstick on.' When I woke up the next morning, I just had lipstick up my cheek. I'd just collapsed - pure exhaustion. That frightened me."

"It [speed] made us mental it did but we loved it like. You know, we loved going raving."

Debbie described how the combination of the speed and the raves gave her a sense freedom.

"It [speed] just made me feel free from everything and everyone, you know. I got out of my hometown. I mean we didn't know anybody so we'd go bonkers coz I used to get so much shit off my ex and every other ex that I didn't give a shit about any of it. I used to love it [raving]."

To support her new lifestyle, Debbie stole speed from her boyfriend at the time, for herself and her best friend. She recalls one significant incident involving speed - she had been taking the drug for two years.

"…like me and Paul [her best friend] would creep off and do it ourselves. I'd say, 'Right lie down then. Open your mouth.' And I'd put a spoonful of the shit down, you know, we were doing so much then. He had a big fit in the end and that stopped us, but I was more liking the pills…"

Debbie's experience of ecstasy varied.

"Different ecstasy tablets, different feelings. I can remember one of the last ecstasy tablets I took was a very smacky one coz you can have upper ones, you can have happy ones, you can have trippy ones…"

Debbie's progression through the different drugs followed a simple pattern - as soon as the effects of one drug wore off, she replaced it with another "stronger" drug.

"… I'd been going from downers to uppers, uppers to downers, downers to uppers. And as soon as I stopped going raving … coz I finished with my ex coz he was a big bully, I started seeing Gareth and I got on the heroin. It weren't him, it was me."

"… I'd done every drug by the time I was 16, everything and anything."

Debbie's initiation with heroin came at the age of sixteen.

"I first started getting on heroin when it was passed to me in a joint… I didn't know whether it was bush, heroin, I mean there's so many different types of ganja, you know… Gareth snatched it out of my mouth and basically said, 'You're not smoking it.' He tried his hardest but in the end it just got a hold of me like."

Soon after her first experience with heroin, Debbie smoked heroin on the foil.

"The first time I ever smoked heroin on the foil, I was sick eight times in half an hour. It makes you violently sick… That still didn't put me off."

"I didn't see smoking it [heroin] as serious. I thought once you used needles, that's serious, not smoking it. That's not serious."

Debbie used heroin again that same day. The regular use of heroin became part of her life "from day one." Her habit quickly began to escalate from the initial £10 bag of heroin a day.

"… we were buying nothing, no food, nothing, and we were smoking grams…"

She describes the effect of heroin as "total relaxation."

"… as if you're drifting off into a deep, deep, deep, deep sleep… You've got no feeling in a way. It feels like you're dead, you're body's dead in some ways but it's still warm."

"I felt happy for once as if I contented myself… I was content in myself because I felt relaxed because I always had it [heroin]…"

" You feel like you're in this little bubble and nobody can burst it but at the same time, you don't realise how much danger you're in. Nobody ever told me that they'd been on it [heroin] for ten years so I thought it was something like I've always done - picked up and put down… with the speed I could stop… It [heroin] was a completely new experience. I didn't understand how serious it was."

Debbie cannot recall the exact amount of heroin that she was smoking at the peak of her habit. Her drug taking had become an automatic process of every day life.

"It depends like, it's not always that we needed it, it's that we'd do it for the sake of it… it was right in front of our faces."

But there were times when Debbie would psychologically and physically crave heroin.

"You wanted just to be back in that safe little bubble. Inside you're feeling bad and bent over and cramps and you know, you're feeling sick but you don't want to be sick, you've got headaches… you feel like you're being pulled by horses from all fours - from your legs, from your arms… It weren't very nice."

The first time that Debbie went without heroin was two years after her initiation with the drug. The absence of heroin in her system was by no means voluntary. At the time there was a heroin drought in the area. The "cluck" experienced by Debbie, aged eighteen, came as "one hell of a shock" to her.

"… I didn't know what this feeling was. It was driving me insane, you know? I thought, 'What's going on?'…"

This particular "cluck" came hours after Debbie last used heroin.

"As soon as I woke up and knew there wasn't anything there, I was pulling my hair out. I was going mental basically. I didn't know what was happening to me…"

When Debbie found out what it was like to experience withdrawal she realised that she needed help.

"You're like a wild animal. You feel like you're climbing the ceiling. You're pulling your hair out. I pulled so much of my hair out you wouldn't believe. You hit yourself, you know, to try and bring yourself out of it, to get that pain away. It just, you feel like that bubble has been burst around you basically and there's nothing you can do about it unless you go back out and get the gear, which was the biggest risk… you have stomach cramps, you feel sick. You don't know whether to put your arse on the toilet or your face down it. You can never get comfortable - you might get comfortable for two seconds but then your knees will play up, you've gotta move…"

"… my skin was getting turned inside out and there were things crawling underneath it… It felt like my head was going to blow up… I didn't know what to do. I was having hot and cold flushes. I didn't know whether to get dressed and go out looking but there was nothing anywhere… You get very nasty and violent coz I did and I'm not a very violent person… that day I really did go for it and, you know, 'Without that [heroin] I can't live,' that's what got into my head 'Without that [heroin] I can't live.'…"

Debbie's friend gave her a few dihydrocodeine (an opiate-based pain killer) to ease the withdrawal that she was experiencing.

"… they done a little bit, but by the end of the night we had a bag [heroin] and it was only something little but it worked… what I needed to tell myself was it was all in my head but I couldn't coz my body was hurting so I thought 'It can't be all in my head,' you know. You start believing you need it."

Debbie was provided with further evidence that she needed help when a friend gave her a photograph. The photograph was of Debbie "gouching out." Debbie could only describe herself as - "I looked dead."

"I felt disgusted in myself of what I'd done but there weren't much I could do about it."

Debbie felt trapped - her addiction and all that it entailed had taken over her life.

"… you get yourself into a routine. We'd wake up, find it, no matter how long it takes to find it, and you take it. But as soon as you take it, you want some more then because the excitement's all over. You get very involved in the going out and getting it. So I mean… you'd smoke as much as somebody give you. My habit got so high that we… had to sell things… we weren't paying no bills…"

"It [her habit] just kept on building and building and building. It's just, one bag weren't enough coz we were sharing it. Then the next bag weren't enough… then we found out it was cheaper to buy a big amount, a bigger amount like a gram… as soon as we found that out then we would smoke as much as we could… It got to the stage where we were just smoking ourselves silly, smoking ourselves to death and it was killing us…"

Debbie's frustration was further antagonised by the realisation that she needed heroin to function normally.

"After a while it wasn't a high. It wasn't 'I'm doing this for a buzz.' It was 'I'm doing this to feel normal,' so I can get up, and I can speak, and I can walk properly instead of walking with my head down."

"I was fed up in the end of just taking this drug to feel normal."

Looking back, Debbie realises that her vulnerability led her to misplace a lot of trust in people that were not trustworthy.

"I was always the youngest and I think that's why I would do that bit more to show, you know, 'I can still do as much as you'… It was hard because there weren't really nobody I could talk to, to trust at the time coz I didn't know who I could trust and who I couldn't so I was trusting a lot of people that I shouldn't have been trusting…"

At the peak of her habit, Debbie describes her relationship with her family as "very distant."

"They knew I was up to something, but they didn't know exactly what I was up to"

It was a difficult time for Debbie. Not only was she coming to terms with the fact that she was addicted to heroin, but she also had to deal with her family's rejection of her boyfriend.

"It was hard for me coz I was fighting two battles and I weren't winning. Well three really, coz with him [her boyfriend], my family and the heroin, and I just weren't winning."

Debbie's initial reasons for trying heroin exposed her naivety, at the time, regarding the strong addictive nature of heroin.

"I thought because I was only sixteen, the police can't arrest me… I think in the beginning it was just the rush of having the excitement of getting caught or whatever. But as time went by then I was thinking, you know, this ain't gonna go away is it?"

Debbie was arrested for the first time when she was eighteen. Police found used foil in her house.

"It hit me really hard when I got arrested the first time. I thought 'Oh shit. This is serious.'…"

"I just couldn't believe I was in that police cell… It frightened me to death… It feels like hell. It's like you're waiting to be hung really…"

Debbie was kept in police custody for twelve hours. She was released with no charge.

Debbie was caught shoplifting when she was eighteen. She maintains that she was not intentionally shoplifting. An item worth fifty-five pence fell into a shopping bag in her shopping trolley as she dashed around the supermarket doing her weekly shop. She received a caution. This was not going to be Debbie's last run in with the law.

Debbie was charged with possession of a Class A drug early in 2001. An internal search was carried out on her and the police discovered three £10 bags of heroin and "a little rock" [heroin]. Debbie has vivid memories of this traumatic ordeal. More concerns were to come.

"The thing that frightened me the most, such that it actually started to make me loathe heroin, was when I got put up in front of the Crown Court and they were saying that I was expecting four years and Gareth was expecting six…"

Gareth was remanded for eight and a half weeks for supplying a Class A drug.

Debbie and Gareth had completed a home detoxification (detox) prior to the court hearing. This appeal for help came six months after Debbie had been dismissed by a local General Practitioner (GP).

"I spoke to a doctor… he basically gave me a sick note for a couple of weeks and told me to get out of his surgery."

"… I said 'Look, I'm a heroin addict. I need help,' It had always been my family doctor's surgery. And basically he told me to get out of the surgery… It was the first time I actually admitted I needed help…"

"… he [the doctor] put me straight off so I thought 'Fuck you!' you know, 'If I die it's gonna be on your conscience not mine.' Basically, I just went a little bit wild after that for a couple months…"

Fortunately, Gareth got involved with a local voluntary agency via his Probation Officer who had provided him with contact numbers of various treatment agencies.

The agency provides a home detox service. This service involves the systematic withdrawal from an addictive drug in the comfort and security of the client's home, under the care of an appropriately trained drug worker and with the support of a GP.

Debbie was encouraged to come off the heroin by her dietician. She was told "…if I didn't stop doing heroin within six weeks, my body would start packing in." Debbie weighed five and a half stone at the time.

Debbie and Gareth's first attempt at a home detox was unsuccessful in the sense that they only managed to stay clean just under a week. However, Debbie believes that the first home detox was beneficial.

"The first home detox showed me what I was in for. It showed me that I could do it and the only reason why I weren't doing it was because I still enjoyed the heroin too much."

"We [Debbie and her boyfriend] sort of played off each other. If one of us were okay, the other one would be terrible. We'd play off each other. It was like we were playing ping pong, all the time back and fore, back and fore… In the end, we were fighting and God knows what. We just couldn't do it. There was no way we were strong enough. And, in the end we just went out and bought it [heroin]."

However, Debbie reduced the amount of heroin she was using to half-a-gram per day.

When Debbie began the second detox, she still had not told her family about her addiction. Her mother worked in the surgery that authorised Debbie's prescription. It was inevitable that she would have to tell her mother. Debbie's mother was devastated by the news. However, she became a tower of strength for both Debbie and Gareth.

"If it wasn't for my family I would be dead coz with the home detox my mother used to come up everyday with a meal for us and make us eat it and we'd take our tablets…"

"My family are all supportive and they've read up on things and they try and understand, and they do understand things."

"I had all the support in the world."

When Debbie began the detox she was prescribed eight dihydrocodeine, 30mgs of diazepam and 20mgs of temazepam a day for a few months.

"I felt like a mad woman. I felt like I'd lost my mind. I felt like I didn't know who I was. If you'd seen me about four years ago I'd have been a completely different person. I was bubbly. I was outgoing… it felt basically like I was dead but my body was still hurting… It just felt like 'Can't somebody come and kill me now' … I thought about suicide more than once or twice."

"You've gotta go through it all. You've gotta go through the body feeling to think, I won't do that again, I won't put my body through that again."

Debbie did not attempt suicide.

"… I deserve much better than everything I've been through. I just want to live normal, you know?… When we were doing the detox I was thinking, 'Well what's gonna happen after this? All I'm gonna have to do is work, work and work and then die. So why not get it over and done with?' instead of going through all this pain. But it kept me going because my family kept me going…"

Debbie remembers how difficult it was coming to terms with life after heroin.

"You're lost. I got very depressed. I kept on staying in the house because I didn't want to go near anybody. Some days I still have the aches but my mind is saying 'No'… but it shook me up that badly that I was willing to put a shotgun in my mouth and blow my own head off at the time. I would've done it definitely. I definitely would've done, it but it's taking the easy way out and I was thinking, 'No, I'm a fighter, I always have been and I'm not letting this shit get the better of me. No way.'…"

"I basically locked all the world away from me."

Soon the psychological effects of taking the dihydrocodeine became more pronounced than the physiological effects for Debbie.

"… it was the fact of taking them tablets each day, you know. I had eight [dihydrocodeine] so it was like 'Right I've taken my tablets, I'm fine now.' And it would be straight after I'd swallowed them tablets I was fine."

Debbie initially managed to resist the temptation of scoring from any one of the three dealers that lived less than fifteen doors away from her. While Gareth was incarcerated, she completed a computer course. However, she found life without Gareth difficult to cope with and she lapsed. She bought two £10 bags of heroin.

"It was the first bit of freedom that I'd ever had basically and it's as if I went mental… I just wanted to get out of the predicament I was in, which was getting him out of prison."

Gareth was released in early September 2001.

Debbie's prescription was changed from dihydrocodeine to subutex. In just over a week, the prescription was reduced from eight dihydrocodeine tablets to one with subutex tablet being introduced at a low dose.

Initially, Debbie's subutex dose was 12mgs, this was reduced to 8 mgs and has recently been reduced to 6 mgs.

"… so I mean I'm fighting a little battle, but I'm not going back to that to actually take heroin because there is no point. I might as well just light my money on fire because I'm gonna be back to square one and there's no way I'd be able to fight that demon again. And that's honestly what I call it. It's a different person inside you and you've actually got to rip it out of you and that's why I felt like my skin was turning inside out. It was as if the badness was coming out of you and the goodness hasn't quite kicked in yet, you know? So you're in the middle of it… Your heads telling you things, you think you're going mental, you've got paranoia…"

Debbie realises that staying clean is an on-going process.

"You can't just shut your body off from it [heroin]. It's like stopping your heart from beating. It's like stopping your kidneys from working… It's like somebody smashing your kneecaps in and telling you to walk. There's no way you could do it."

"I'll tell you the truth, it [heroin] is an evil, evil drug that takes a very long time to come out of you. And you've gotta fight it every day and I mean everyday for the rest of your life. Some days are better than others, but you've still gotta fight it. You've still gotta keep on fighting it coz it doesn't just go away."

Debbie feels that the heroin has cheated her of four years of her life.

"It's as if the last four years have just robbed me completely of everything… It's robbed me of my own life and it's robbed me of my dignity that I've got to work to have back…"

Debbie is still drinking alcohol - roughly two glasses of wine a night. She also smokes half an ounce of cannabis a week.

"It's a lot to come down from. Burning the foil, making the tube, wiping the foil down, making it nice and clean. Getting the heroin out, putting it on the foil, making it into a beetle. It's like having a bath, drying and getting dressed. It's a routine, its something you do. So, when there's nothing to do with your hands, even if you're painting or whatever, it's never quite the same. That why I think we do smoke dope, coz it's rolling and sprinkling and everything."

Debbie currently receives monthly counselling. She also sees a psychiatrist and a dietician.

Looking back, Debbie thinks that deep down she knew she had a heroin problem long before she admitted it.

"I think I always knew deep down but I always thought 'No, it can't be me.' I always knew there was something wrong, but it never entered my head it'd be me until I realised what I was doing to myself. Until I realised I was killing myself, even though I weren't injecting it, I was killing myself. And if I had carried on I think I would be dead, no I'd definitely be dead. And there was no one or no way anybody could have stopped me."

"I just don't understand how I got in to it and why nobody told me how deceptive it is. I never dreamt in a million years that I'd go on heroin."

Debbie used heroin for three and a half years.

Debbie feels that whether you smoke heroin or inject heroin, the journey back from addiction is dependent on the same mind-set.

"At the end of the day, you say to your head, 'No. My body don't need anything' and you get up and you walk or something. Your head will come round then in the end to thinking 'God no, it doesn't need anything.'…"

Debbie had a minor relapse on New Years Eve 2001.

"It [heroin] was free and he'd [Gareth] pissed me off coz he'd already had some. I did it just to prove to him that I can be just as bad as you. But, I don't want to be just as bad as him, you know? I wanna be my own person. I want to get my own personality back."

"It sort of clicked in my head then, 'What the hell am I doing? 'I'm not putting my family through another one of these…'"

"… once you get a taste of that life back again, the life you had before, the life you led before, no heroin could ever make you feel that good."

"Now I loathe the stuff. I really loathe the stuff for what it's done to so many friends, my family and everything, you know? It's just, it seems a waste of time even the concept of it - you don't realise how deep it goes. It goes right into your bones… You don't realise that by smoking this, it's gonna make you go crazy for it and pull your own hair out for it…"

There has been recent discussion in this country about users being prescribed heroin by their GP. Debbie does not support this idea.

"I'm not really convinced with that one because I think that's just taking the easy way out… You're having your habit for nothing, basically"

During March of this year, Debbie had another run in with the police. Her house was raided and a small amount of heroin was found in her back garden. Debbie is adamant that her and Gareth were not using heroin at the time. In fact, as part of his Drug Treatment and Testing Order, Gareth was regularly tested for drugs - Debbie claims he had provided forty consecutive clean urine samples.

Debbie believes that Gareth and her were set up.

"I know about heroin - I know how to keep it, I know how to make sure it's all right. You don't just wrap it in foil and chuck it out your back. You put it in cling film, you put it in plastic bags, you make sure it's airtight. You make sure it's out of sight so you dig a big hole, you make sure nothing can get in to it, you make sure nothing can get out of it…"

"There was no foil, no paraphernalia, nothing…"

"… he [police officer] was saying 'Well I can't understand this, there's no paraphernalia here.' And what they said was basically because we've been off the drugs now, it's easier for us to sell it. You know, as if we want to meet up with all the people again. I don't think they quite grasp the concept of addiction."

The police also discovered a small amount of cannabis in Debbie's house that she freely admitted belonged to her.

This particular raid was unlike any other raid Debbie had experienced. She felt that the police knew exactly what they were looking for and where they would find it.

"… it was so calm. They didn't search upstairs…"

Debbie and Gareth are currently on bail pending further investigation. They strongly maintain their innocence.

The timing of the raid was unfortunate, as Debbie had been asked by a senior police officer to accompany him on school talks about drugs.

"… to show a police officer and somebody who broke the law coming together in trying to get these children to understand not to take drugs…"

"I don't really like to walk about with a policeman either, you know? But it has to be done. Kids gotta know coz we're being too softly, softly with them, I think. I think we're not telling them actually, you know, how hard hitting it is."

"They [school teachers] showed us what they were but they didn't tell us what they done in school… I'm not saying they didn't tell us not to take it, I'm saying they didn't explain it properly. They didn't explain the effects…"

The police officer was away on holiday at the time of the raid.

Both Debbie and Gareth are keen to start working.

"… basically, we're stuck until we can both find good jobs… even if we working and only earning £10 extra a week than what were getting at the moment from our giro, that would be everything really coz we do want to start working."

Debbie is scheduled to start training as a volunteer at a local treatment agency in September.

"I'm really, really looking forward to that…"

Debbie is keen to develop a career as a drugs worker. She wants to provide young people with reliable information about drugs that will allow them to make informed choices about drugs.

"… yeah, there is good points to it [heroin] coz I did feel good. But there's other points where you haven't got any and you feel terrible. You just feel like you want to rip your own arms and legs off to stop it from hurting. And it's unbelievable. It's something I would never go through again, never ever again in my life and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy and I've got a couple of them!"

"… it does all start with cannabis I think or, it's either cannabis or it's speed it starts off, in my opinion."

"It [heroin] is actually the new cannabis. Definitely. Coz when I was twelve, I can remember smoking bongs and all that. It's exactly the same with heroin."

"… the age of heroin takers is getting so young… eleven and thirteen year olds doing it. It doesn't seem humane…"

Having lived through this experience, Debbie feels that she has been given a new lease on life.

"It feels like I've been set free. It feels like I've got a new life in a way coz I've cut away from so many people. But it's like a breath of fresh air. It's as if I couldn't breathe before… now it feels as if I can take deep breaths and I can go walking, you know? It's brilliant. I love it… I've just gotta find out now who I am coz I was only 16 in the beginning. I knew who I was then but I need to find out who I am now."

"I thought I could do a weeks detox and be back to who I was before I started with it [heroin]. I don't think you ever, ever go back to who you were 'coz you've always got that experience behind you… It's not just experiencing the pain I went through, it's the pain I see other people go through. It's the power I see it [heroin] can give, it's the control it has on people… You know, to control something that badly, that bit of powder, it seems psychotic. It doesn't seem right."

The underlying message behind Debbie's advice to anyone coming off heroin is one of hope.

"I'd say to them - … They know what they're going to have to fight and there's no need to be frightened coz fighting it and coming off it doesn't kill you. It's the staying on it that kills you…"

" It's the evilest thing you could ever get into. Get out of it as quickly as you can. It doesn't matter if it takes a while to come off your tablets afterwards just get off the heroin. Just think of getting off the heroin, you know?"

"That's the thing I would say to somebody who's doing a detox - try the tablets first, methadone's a last resort coz it goes straight into your bones and it's a lot longer to get off it and it's a lot harder coz you go through a second cluck which some people say is worse than heroin."

"Get yourself prepared and ready for it and then basically make sure you've got somebody there for you as well. Make sure you've got a close friend or mother or father who you can phone at any time if you need to…"

"If you get help and you get the right tablets and you get the right medication you can come off the drug. It hurts, it hurts like mad but you can do it and I mean some people do it after ten years. You can do it, you know, it's not impossible…"

Debbie is convinced that a person can only succeed at beating their addiction when they are ready to make the transition to a non-drug user.

"…I can have as much help in the world but I had to turn round and say 'Right I have had enough of this. I wanna do it [detox]'."

"I think only the person can do it… They can only come off the drug if they really, really want to. It's about the person having the strength and the self-belief that they can beat their addiction."

"I used to think that I needed drugs to make me high. Now I realise you can get high off life."

Debbie asked if a poem, "Till Death Us Do Part", could be linked to her story. The author of the poem is unknown. Debbie received a copy of the poem from a friend who claimed that it was written by a girl in prison, who she believes has passed away.

Debbie empathises with the words of the poem describing the journey into the arms of heroin. However, the author's inability to resist heroin is unlike Debbie's experience as she continues on her road to recovery.

Debbie's Story is also available as a Printable Adobe PDF document

Rebecca Hancock June 11th 2002