The whole debate in whether or not I was born an addict I really don’t know, the one thing I can tell you is my behavior from a very young age portrayed an addictive nature, the need to escape if you like.

When I was born my natural mother was in a very bad situation and unfortunately led to me being fostered then eventually adopted. I was adopted to a very loving and genuine family who bought me up as their own son, all through my childhood I didn’t want or need for anything, we lived in a beautiful house and had the best of everything, I can always remember feeling different but was always very happy. My first experience of using chemicals was when I was around eight years old, as a child I suffered very badly with asthma and for this I had to use inhalers in order to help me breathe. I don’t know why but one day I inhaled a lot more than I should have and this gave me the same effect as sniffing any kind of solvent would, I liked the buzz this gave me, obviously it made me feel good and I liked this, from that day on I would do it regularly.

With this I also became very manipulative and would get my mother to take me to the doctors to get more by saying I had lost them, or they were not full when I got them. I did this for some time and it was in the last year of junior school I started sniffing gas and tippex thinners, as I went through into comp I soon found that cannabis was widely available and to began to smoke this on a regular basis also.

I began to rebel against everything and everyone in a big way, I would skive off school, go shop lifting, hang around with all the boys I was always told to stay away from, soon the tables turned and my friends parents would be telling them to stay away from me! Through my teens I very quickly began to loose any motivation with normal life, taking drugs became a daily thing and soon began to dabble with other drugs such as speed and acid, I loved these drugs, they made me feel confident, liked and accepted by everyone. I ended up leaving school with no qualifications; all I had achieved by now was quite a big criminal record, and a bad reputation in the town I was living in.

I became involved in a lot crime in order to support my addiction. It got to the point where I would do anything to get money for drugs. I stole off my family regularly, sold everything electrical in the house several times over and had no regard whatsoever for anyone else’s property or feelings. My first real taste of pure oblivion was when I was seventeen I went to an illegal rave party where I tried ecstasy. To me this was it, the thing I had been looking for.After that, several close friends and myself would spend every given moment getting money and drugs ready for every weekend. It was like a full time job, robbing, stealing, selling drugs, whatever we could to get money for the weekend we did. I had known where to get heroin for a long time but seeing people I knew who used it and what It did to them just didn’t appeal to me, so I choose for a long time not to do it. It was after a party that I went back to someone’s house in Bath for an after party and it was there I tried heroin for the first time.