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By Melissa Fleur Afshar
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Most 12-year-olds busy themselves with video games or sports, but when I was 12 in the late 1990s, I was introduced to a much darker pastime. In my first year of high school, I was roped into taking heroin, and that opened the door to 26 years of addiction, criminality, institutions and jails.
Growing up, I felt different to everyone. I believed that there was something missing, something wrong with me.
That day I tried heroin for the first time in school toilets; I had been hiding because I didn't have the courage to go to class.
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I suffered from crippling anxiety and just couldn't leave the cubicle. I soon heard the close-by noise of a lighter striking and the rustle of tin foil, and two voices talking to each other in hushed, secretive tones. As I peered over the top of the cubicle, intrigued, I saw two older students smoking the Schedule I drug.
Before I even really understood what was happening, I was with them.
Over the next 16 years, my life kept orbiting the same vicious loop, a carousel that I was unable to get off. From police station to prison, homelessness to hospital bed—always beaten, always broken by my addiction. I just could not stop using drugs. I felt powerless to the point of being on death's door on numerous occasions, still unable to find a way to get clean.
Addiction has an appetite for moral values, and this appetite is endless, decaying every aspect of an individual's life and leading to a spiritual void.
I know that void because I lived in it for too many years.
"I was roped into taking heroin at 12."
In 2017, I decided to get clean and change my life. I was 36 at the time and had been attending a 12-step recovery meeting. I was introduced to a new way of life, and for the first time ever, I was able to accept support. The reason for that is because the people offering support were not professionals with textbooks and clipboards but recovering addicts themselves. They understood me. I understood them.
As soon as I got clean, I knew I wanted to help other people do the same.
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Initially, I moved into support work in a variety of third-sector organizations in my home city of Leeds in England. I kept myself busy by doing any odd job I could to give back to the community. Two years later, I started Getting Clean as a volunteer group, providing peer-to-peer support and hope to other addicts.
We did everything we could to help people, mainly through DIY jobs for the elderly or disabled, all to keep us busy and clean. We planted wildflower meadows in the communities that brought wildlife back.
Since then, we've evolved into a Community Interest Company, a type of enterprise in the U.K. designed to benefit communities rather than generate owner profits. This has led to a variety of activities from community clean-ups to conservation projects, and we have meaningfully touched the lives of more than 100 addicts to date, helping them in their journey of recovery.
I then started a naturally-derived soap brand called Getting Clean to donate money back to the cause and employ people in recovery.
I started making the soap bars in my mom's kitchen, and now, we hold therapeutic soap-making workshops, helping people in recovery learn how to make soap—giving them a skill, something to do. The order book continued to grow, and now Getting Clean has evolved into a mission-driven soap business led by people with lived experience of addiction.
I employ nine people in recovery.
‘Community Support From Recovered Addicts Changes Everything'
Over 300,000 people are addicted to heroin and crack cocaine in England, where I live, linked to around half of all theft, burglary and robbery. In the U.S., 47.7 million Americans aged 12 and older, were "current illegal drug users" in 2023.
Two out of three employers say they wouldn't hire a former addict, so people who do get clean often can't get work, and without a system of responsibility to fall into, relapse is more likely. Addiction touches families, communities, healthcare providers and the criminal justice system.
We're trying to break that cycle by putting people in recovery into real jobs with responsibility.
As recovering addicts ourselves, at Getting Clean we can truly empathize with others struggling with the same problems. We understand how the physical and social symptoms of addiction create what can seem like insurmountable barriers for addicts trying to rehabilitate and reintegrate into society.
My message to anyone struggling with addiction would be this; you are not alone, and recovery is available.
Your addiction will try to convince you that neither of these things are true. A meeting with other recovering addicts, however, will show you that both are. Don't be afraid to speak your true feelings rather than pretending you don't care. Anyone can get clean. I am living proof.
Chris Sylvester, 45, is based in Leeds, England.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Marc Vargas and Emma Lee-Sang
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