Drug use is something I can relate to and want to help to others with. When I first tried to sum up my experience I ended up writing for 3 hours and it was 3500 words long and that was only scratching the surface as I have a lot to say, I will try to keep it to a minimum to not bore anyone but if you are interested and we are in contact you can ask me and I will be happy to share my experiences with you.

I moved to the UK from Denmark when I was five, and with a foreign name like Joachim it was definitely met with awkwardness. I never really felt like I fitted into any group until I was around thirteen and started hanging around with people who were always getting into trouble. It all started when I went to my friend Marks house and his friend rang to ask if he was coming out. We went out and got the big bottles of lambrini and got drunk on a bench with his friends. At the time it was one of the funniest nights I had ever had and decided those were the kind of people I wanted to associate with.

Quite quickly I was drinking every weekend, and started smoking weed when I was fourteen. I finally felt I found 'my group' and even though we would rip each other to bits, it was such a good laugh and I knew my friends had my back. Then I slowly started taking other drugs when I was fifteen and at this point I was smoking weed everyday and did for many years to come.

When I was seventeen, my step dad was diagnosed with a brain tumour which I didn’t find out was cancer till later on. He had it removed, but then a second one came back, he had that one removed also, and had to go through chemotherapy and radiotherapy which turned him into a frail shell of the man he once was. It was all heart-breaking to watch.

On my eighteenth birthday, well two days after it because it was the Friday I went out to celebrate it, I got some cocaine and was at my friend’s house for pre-drinks for my first real night out in town. On the way to the bus, I looked up in the air and it was like someone hit me with a baseball bat in the head. I had never felt pain like it before and so started my nightmare. The intense throbbing pain calmed down a little but never went away and I assumed like any other pain it would go away soon enough so we proceeded to go to town, but after an hour I had to go home because the pain was unbearable. The next day I went to hospital with my mum where I had to stay overnight, have my spinal fluid checked for blood and then sent on my way still not better.

The pain spread down my neck, jaw and shoulders where it still is now seven years later. No drugs could take this pain away, and in fact most only made it worse. Then came the news that my step dads brain tumour grew back, but this was to be his last as it was somewhere which was inoperable and was told to go to a hospice with only weeks to live. I went to visit him everyday seeing him get slowly worse knowing what was coming soon. We always had a strict step dad – always getting up to trouble step son type relationship, but it wasn’t until he got ill that I realised that he was my father, he was the one who raised me, taught me to ride a bike, told me to do my homework, called me a dickhead when I was being one, taught me what it meant to be a man. He died within a few weeks. I didn't realise till he died that you can have a bond with someone stronger than blood, since he wasn't my biological father I felt like I didn't deserve to be as unhappy about it as my sisters, but it truely fucked me up beyond belief. I never felt I really got to say how unfair I felt the whole thing was because he never wanted to talk about it, and at times I wasn’t sure if he even knew he was dying as he would keep asking me when he was going home. To which pulling on my heart strings I would answer soon, because how do you tell someone you love they’re not leaving this room, they’re going to die there?

I’ve never felt as distraught about anything in my life, I think I cried everyday for around two years and it still feels very recent even though it was six years ago. It made me spiral out of control in my drug use as I just didn’t see the point of anything anymore, even if I did everything by the book like he did (education, good job, exercise, healthy eating), I could just drop dead for no reason and that messed me up. I started doing whatever I felt like whenever I felt like doing it, by which mostly it was just drugs, drugs and more drugs.

It was around this time a friend offered me some diazepam, which I took and to my surprise it was the only thing that had ever helped the constant pain I was in (in my neck). Within not long I was taking it every weekend as a kind of ticket to being pain free for the night which I felt I deserved after a week of crying myself to sleep every night in agony.

Within a year or so, I thought to myself that I didn’t deserve to be in pain all the time and started self medicating with them daily, to such a high level that no dealer I knew could keep up with my demand so I switched over to a similar drug called Etizolam which was legal at the time and which I could buy in the thousands at once on the internet. The problem with this type of drug is you can’t keep up with how fast your tolerance builds, and within not long you need to take high doses just to feel normal, so that when you don’t have it in your system and between doses, the problem/pain is even worse than it was before you took them!

I spiralled into quite a deep depression for the next few years, writing my suicide note out in my head on a daily basis because I didn’t know how else I would make all my pain and suffering end and got to a point where I thought maybe not everyone deserves to be happy and I’m just one of the unlucky few. One of the reasons I never did it was because I never actually wanted to die, I just wanted to be happy and felt like there was no point in life if I was to be incapacitated by pain both physically and mentally on a daily basis for the rest of my life.

I ended up at a point where I would take around 30 pills a day at my high point along with smoking 2-3 grams of weed leading to my family giving me an ultimatum that either I stopped or I went to rehab. To which stubbornly I said was no problem and to just give me a month. So I slowly tapered down over the month and stopped taking the benzodiazepines. Within not long because I never really wanted to stop I slowly started taking them again, and it wasn’t until Easter a year and a half ago that I had what 'alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity' (Pulp Fiction), when I realised how much I had self sabotaged my life and effected those I love most which broke me down into tears. I remember crying to my mum and confessing all the stupid things I had done across the years and lied to her about because I knew this time things had to and were going to change, I could feel it, I also set the bar so that if I fucked up anymore I had no chances left and would get made homeless, failure wasn’t an option. I got myself a job within three days, I was having withdrawal symptoms at the time so I was having to go in the back and puke, then go back out and serve customers while pretending everything was fine with the customers and my co-workers. Luckily they subsided within a week or two, but the real challenge was working being in physical pain 24/7, and after around a couple months I had to quit because the pain was so unbearable. But, I didn’t want to stop the positive flow there, instead I decided that if I can stop drugs, I can help others with their drug problems or offending behaviour, so I enrolled in university to take Criminology, and to my surprise got in. I finished my first year with a 2:1 and am half way through my second year. I have been drug free for two years after abusing drugs for nine years, and I will continue to stay clean.

Since stopping drugs my pain has improved a lot but it would be a lie if I said there was never a moment where I wouldn't like to take drugs, especially knowing how much it would help when my pain is unbearable and my thoughts are too much to handle, but I’ve learnt to focus on the fact that there will be better days, and if I have a shit week, better weeks will come. I refuse to ever become a victim to drugs again and even if I see doctors I specifically ask for medicine that can't be used to get high, not that I am worried it would be a problem, it wouldn't, rather I just don't need the temptation. Like I said, it was like something clicked in me and I knew I had to change, and that I was going to, I remember even though it was day one, I felt proud of myself because I knew at that point I had finally stopped taking drugs for good even if I was the only one who actually believed so at the time. I have no fear of returning to that life as I know I will not let it happen.

I am in no delusion that suddenly everything in my life is easy since stopping drugs, it isn’t, I actually developed social anxiety badly after stopping drugs and having to deal with how I feel without the help of being distracted by drugs on a daily basis is a struggle. However, not taking drugs certainly has many benefits, my mind is clearer and though I’m in pain 24/7 I feel much happier, the suicidal thoughts have disappeared and I’ve started to appreciate what I do have instead of focusing on what I don’t have, as it doesn't benefit me, nor does it get me closer to my goals in life. I have found a new appreciation for life which I didn’t have before. I now have a closer relationship to my family which means everything to me as I distanced myself from them over the years because I felt ashamed and embarrassed about my drug use.

The person who supported me through it all was my mum, even when I didn’t deserve it and would have understood if she hadn’t.  I’ll be eternally grateful for her unconditional support and I don’t know where I would be without her. My mum is the sweetest, most kind hearted person I know and inspires me to be a better person. She is one of the reasons I want to help people, because I know not everyone is as lucky as me. So, I want to be the person who won’t judge or belittle, who will be there when it’s tough, and have your best interests at heart, like my mum did for me.  

I want to use my negative experiences to help others change their lives for the better by dedicating time to help others who are battling with addiction or have stopped but feel they may be at risk of falling back into old habits as we all know how easy that can be. I want to give people an opportunity to be able to talk about how they feel without the fear of being judged and maybe be able to recommend some techniques or give some advice which may not have been thought about otherwise, and just be able to support those who need it and feel they don’t get the support in life they need. The service will be free, as I don’t want anyone interested in getting help from me to be turned away because they can’t afford it. As mentioned, I am currently a full time student but I will happily make time to help those who need it, I’ll just have to figure out exactly how I’m going to do so! It goes without saying but anything you tell me will be strictly confidential.