Suzy (not her real name) went to a leading Northern Rivers high school but at 15 was lured away to Sydney by an older man who introduced her to the drug scene. During the next five years in “a different place and a different world” she got into speed, alcohol and marijuana, and eventually came into contact with the police, and the hospital system.
Back home, she felt estranged from family, and rebelled again, seeking out the local drug scene, and ending up involved with a biker club:
“I felt like I fitted in. I gained some protection and felt secure. I was being supplied drugs, so my addiction soared… there were a lot of females in my situation… it just ruined their lives really. I was hitting the drugs and alcohol really hard and notched up a few criminal records of my own.”
Suzy now finds her past haunting her - when she applies for jobs her record often “bites me on the backside.”
On the positive side, “I feel the only work I can do now is in the Drug and Alcohol field and I’ve studied to support that. I think they are the only people who are going to value my experience, so I’ll keep following that path.”
Drug addition wasn’t a life
“Drug people, drug scene, drug houses, drug people... Once you start living that, that’s what you live. You don’t go for coffee at the local café, you don’t do a big supermarket shop, you don’t do those normal sort of things, you just go to houses where you know everyone is doing drugs and you only really associate with people where you can get on or get something free that day.
“There were times when I was homeless using drugs and not wanting to stay at a dealer’s house for the next week using drugs. Now with Ice becoming more prevalent it’s so scary, it’s just a rabid drug. It’s so strong, it’s poison, it totally removes the person and it’s just so evil and you are just an evil being, you totally lose yourself.
“Your existence is totally owned by this drug. Horrible. It’s only making drug dealers richer. It’s really dirty, if someone had told me back then what goes into this drug, there’s no way I would have been doing it.”
She says there are three main classes of addicts – the high functioning ones who have high profile jobs… Still functioning, they have access to things and because they have discipline they can pull it off. Then there are the ones like labourers who work hard all day and pay their bills, have kids, have that balance, they can do it all but they still use and dabble.
“And then then there are the ones at rock bottom who thieve every day to have a shot, they are walking the street at night trying to rob someone’s car.
“In the end I had three children and I was married. I was living a straight life with my husband but of a night I was leaving the home to go and do drugs.
“At this point I started using ice. It was around 2010, at the age of 23. I put all my energy into a new relationship and when you are using drugs with someone you are so protected and you just rely on that relationship so much.
“My children were very young when this was happening and I’m grateful for that… over the last two years of that I was pretty much absent from the home.
“My ex just kept life so busy for them and my mother played a huge role in supporting my ex and the kids.
“I’m grateful for all of that but like a lot of families who are involved with this drug stage, it came to a point where I was told that I wasn’t going to be seeing the kids anymore. “You need to go and clean up” and that’s the point where I thought yes, and so I did.
Cleaning up
Suzy cleaned up with the help of the MERIT program, pioneered on the North Coast, and was referred to Cessnock rehab… “I talk about filling the circle you are in every day, as you have to exhaust yourself, because if I didn’t have courses, I would have been sitting at home isolated, thinking ‘I’ll just make a phone call’. Because after everything I have gone through there is depression and people are social creatures and we need to be around people. Whether good or bad people, we do need them.”
She went through the court system and got shared child custody… “The only people I see now are my children and the teachers at school drop off…
“I can wake up tomorrow and know that I have a fridge with food in it. I don’t have people knocking on my door all night long. That life is so horrible and it’s really hard for someone to understand unless you’ve done it.”
At the recommendation of her GP, she sought help from a Drug and Alcohol counsellor, and being able to access both when needed has helped her feel safe.
“I think a lot of people still in the scene don’t know what services are free. So I never knew if I was in a rehab that Centrelink pays for that. And then at the end of that you get a bit of money to get yourself some accommodation.
“And people don’t know about the Drug and Alcohol Clinic Riverlands… some people think it’s just for methadone and people wonder what do you have to do to get in there.”
Less stigma, more hard facts
Suzy recalls, “The thought of being judged straight away when you go to hospital can stop you. If you are sitting in the ED waiting room with track marks and looking rat shit… you feel like you’re the last person anyone is going to want to deal with.
“What we are doing is illegal, society doesn’t want to accept it, society doesn’t understand addiction and of course you are not going to go there because a hospital is to treat ‘those people’, not us.
“I wish the hospitals could have a section or a room where you could get that help, have a bed and dry out and then go to Riverlands, just so it can start to happen.
“GPs have to be brave enough to broach the subject…say to the patient ‘your general health is shit and is a sleeping pill going to help you long term?’
“I think it would be really helpful to have a practice for addicts where you are not going to feel judged, and they can also access other information on services and support.
“What I’d like to see is schools doing more drug education, we need to get quite graphic about it. If you told kids what they are putting into these drugs – chlorine, lighter fluid? any pharmaceutical drugs that are cheap and nasty and keep you awake… It’s about saving a life.
We need to have more conversations with our kids around drugs… if they are at a party and they’ve had something which has caused a reaction, the fear of getting help is huge as they think they’ll get into trouble with the police. What they need to do is just call the ambulance, the police don’t have to be involved. I don’t think all kids know that.”
