Telling It Like It Was –

August 4, 2019 – There is no shortage of drug memoirs in bookshops. We’ve all read examples of the genre. I’m convinced that, most of the time, the main thing that drugs can teach us about the universe is what it’s like to be on drugs.

Mine is a particular kind of drug book. I am not Tony Montana and my story is not Requiem for a Dream … The fact, though I didn’t say as much, was that I did smoke crack, did almost die and had been through a fancy rehab – several times. For over a decade I spent half my waking hours acquiring and using drugs and the other half trying to hide that fact. After a decent apprenticeship, I got good at both. And yet the patterns of thought and behaviour that surfaced during my years of addiction weren’t totally alien to me. I’d long seen life, as far back as childhood, as a complex and fraught series of acquisitions and ingestions, of obsessive consumption and the rigidly patterned structuring of my environment and behaviour – as well as an ongoing and dedicated dissimulation of these.

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