HELPING OTHERS –
August 25, 2025 – A former drug addict, whose addiction had a “traumatic” effect on his family, has said he wants to help others going through the same thing. Andrew Deane-Williams, 47, battled with alcohol and drug addiction from his early teens, but said it was the impact on his “broken family” later in life that really struck him. Now he is launching a new charity, called Broken Chains UK, to support children and young people whose parents are dealing with drug addiction.
“Drug addiction is messy, it’s chaotic and it takes your soul. My kids suffered and it was fairly apparent that they had to recover from my addiction just as well as I did,” he said.
“When you think about drug addiction, and addicts in particular, you’re focusing a lot on them and not so much on the family.”
After first becoming addicted to alcohol and drugs in his teens, and describing his 20s as a “wipeout”, Mr Deane-Williams said he became “clean” by the age of 30, got married to his wife, Abi, and had four children. But he said that he spiralled back into addiction following the return of an old football injury and being prescribed opiate-based painkillers.
“That just set me off again into a whole world of pain and darkness and struggle,” he said. “It led me to a really, really dark place, just moody, angry, just not present.”
