WATCH – She had to have something –
Sept. 1, 2020 – Ms Owen was warned from a young age about the dangers of narcotics. But struggling with her mental health as a young adult, she began to “dabble” in party drugs as a means of escape.
“It sort of went from you know, a more acceptable pile of drugs to these hotter drugs,” she said.
“In the end, heroin and meth got the large majority of us, and there were about five or six of us that ended up in rehab.”
Ms Owen moved to Sydney to break her addiction and was prescribed valium to quell her anxiety. But the treatment only added to her woes when her meth addiction returned.
“My life really started falling apart, I couldn’t keep it together anymore,” she said.
“I was using lots of different drugs at once just to sort of feel normal again and that was just purely to treat an underlying anxiety and an underlying emptiness.”
Ms Owen is now in recovery and is working in the harm reduction field, hoping to change the stigma surrounding drug overdoses.
She said it’s been hard work every day to get where she is now, but the effort has been worth it.
