The former drug addicts who took recovery into their own hands

In Lanarkshire, Bobby Stewart will shake his head as he wakes up and remembers that he is four years clean and sober, though he didn’t think he’d even make 90 days.

People used to tell him he’d be dead by 40, just like his mother who was an alcoholic. Now 45, he has to catch several buses to get to his volunteering work with Addaction and Hamilton Accies, a football club working with former addicts. It’s worth it.

And then there’s Sandra, who spent two years screaming for help for her heroin addict daughter. In the process she has not only managed to save her own daughter’s life but helped revolutionise addiction services in Midlothian, where she lives. Gone are the 12-week waiting lists. Now those looking for help can make an appointment the next day and families get help from the support group Sandra now runs.

At this recovery conference – held at the Bridge in Glasgow’s Easterhouse and organised by the Scottish Government-chaired Partnership for Action on Drugs in Scotland – there are probably hundreds of similar stories to tell.

Here people talk with openness and honesty about trauma and emotional pain, about lives devastated by addiction and pulled back from the brink. These are not just stories of survival but of building better lives.

It is the second year this gathering has taken place. This year it is themed around “flourishing communities”. Its aim is to make recovery more visible, to send the message that it is possible.

With drug-related deaths predicted to rise to more than 1000 this year, the need for that message has never been more urgent. Many people here have lost loved ones. Sandra’s daughter nearly ended up as one of those statistics.

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“It’s been horrendous,” she says quietly. “But things have turned around and that’s what’s amazing about it. Two years ago the services were diabolical. My daughter felt hopeless, like a failure. I didn’t know where to turn.”

There are so many tales to tell. At one point, due to a threat to her daughter’s life, the two fled to their caravan holiday home 70 miles from the chemist where she had to pick up her methadone script on a daily basis. She had to drive 140 miles every 24 hours to pick up the medication.

At another point her daughter arrived for an appointment at 9am on Monday morning in active withdrawal from heroin but had to wait for hours without getting medication.

“She was in severe withdrawals, sitting in a public waiting room for everyone to see her,” says Sandra. “After being refused help she walked out and she wanted to throw herself under a bus. Addiction is a life-threatening illness. If she had cancer she would never have been treated like that.”

It was a red line for Sandra, who made change her mission. She sent a five-page complaint to NHS Lothian calling for heads to roll. “I had a meeting with the heads of department and they held their hands up and admitted that the way me and my daughter was treated was wrong. Over the last two years we’ve been working together to change things and that’s where the successes came.”

She has learned change is about attitude as much as money. But the crucial improvement has been in speeding up the time addicts who are looking for help to get seen.

When her daughter – who has been in recovery – relapsed recently following the overdose of someone close to her, the wait in Edinburgh was 12 weeks. “She would have been dead if she’d had to wait that long,” says Sandra. So she took her home to Midlothian, got her seen and put on a methadone prescription the next day. Within four weeks she was back in recovery.

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This recovery community is a burgeoning one. Today there are people from all over Scotland – Aberdeen, Dumfries and Galloway, Forth Valley, Dundee, Oban and beyond.

Even five years ago recovery cafes – spaces where those in drug or alcohol recovery can meet in a safe space for both therapeutic and social activities – were a relatively new concept.

NOW they are popping up all over Scotland, often run by volunteers in recovery with a striking ability to make emotional connections.

Queuing for lunch, McKenna, 50, says this story should be a positive one. “There is too much talk about deaths,” he tells me. “Look at what people here have achieved. Recovery is possible. That’s the message we want to put out there.”

He knows how hard the fight to recover can be. A former panel beater, he was addicted to drugs and alcohol for 30 years. “I was trapped in a methadone script and then I was in prison, and I was homeless and on the streets of Glasgow. I lost my kids, my family, my business,” he says. “I lost my dignity, the will to live. Suicide was the only option. A wee guy found me on the bridge and he took me to the Community Addiction Team.

“I had been trapped in that cycle for 30 odd years. I was in and out of chemists, all my pals were taking methadone and I thought that was normal. Then I got to the stage the methadone stopped working and I’d use drugs on top.

“Two years ago I went into a treatment centre to come off methadone and I had to make a decision, did I want to be here on not? I went to college, I started playing rugby, going to men’s health classes, I got an SVQ. Now I do this.

“My son is now trying to contact me and I’ve got a grandkid that I’ve not met. And for me, well, that is worth focusing on.”

Now he’s out there preaching about what’s possible, doing presentations for the Community Addiction Team (CAT), taking workshops and volunteering at recovery cafes.

He has his own flat, a dog to love, his own couch to sit on. “I can pay my own bills and be proud of that,” he says. “And I don’t care about what anyone thinks of me. I’ve got freedom in my life.”

It breaks his heart that not everyone does. “Last Friday I put a 27-year-old boy in the ground after he overdosed,” he says. “That wee boy shouldn’t have died. How could we have got that boy to come to places like this, make it more attractive to him? Let’s stop judging people – that’s my suggestion. I just don’t know how we’re going to do that.”

Joe Fitzpatrick MSP, Minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing – who is keynote speaker at the conference, understands stigma is still a barrier.

“When you look at the growing size of the recovery movement, that’s really heartening,” he says. “It shows the successes we are having, and that recovery is possible.

“Events that make recovery visible, like the recovery walk, like today’s conference, are really important. The journey to recovery can be a long one. For some people it’s just about stopping drinking alcohol, but for others it can be a much more complicated. If we can ensure that we don’t judge and have compassion for people on that journey, well that would be a start.”

For some here that doesn’t sound like enough. Despite the messages of hope there is frustration too that the recovery movement is not getting more support.

Bill McKay has been in recovery for 14 years and runs Love N Light Recovery with his wife Fiona in Lanarkshire. He believes that as statutory services are not making enough impact and more should be invested in the recovery movement.

He was just ten years old when he started sniffing glue and quickly moved to hash, booze, and heroin. He spent time in prison and nearly lost his family – his wife and three kids – in the process.

He finally took himself to rehab after the death of his parents. “He did get himself sorted out and we became a family again,” explains Fiona.

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Now his recovery group focusses on families and aims to break the cycle that sees addiction passed from generation to generation.

McKay, a trained hypnotherapist, life coach and NLP leader, says he’s able to help because of the insight he has into addiction. “In my family there was a lot of psychological abuse,” he says. “We were scheme kids. There was psychological warfare in our house.

“I’m not blaming anyone. But I know that I picked up glue it gave me a channel to get away from my reality.”

Most addicts are doing what they’re doing because something is wrong, he insists. Attention, he says, needs to be on the root causes.

“People are beginning to realise the system is set up to deal with the symptoms, not the cause. This is why this recovery movement is so good. But if you have a movement you need support from the top. They should be coming to us and saying: “What can we do to help?”.

“In truth I still think we are quite isolated and disconnected. There are so little recovery services and so much addiction in Lanarkshire. The services are overwhelmed.”

He worries that his volunteers are getting burnt out – and when they advertised plans to open a new cafe in Wishaw in the new year they were contacted by almost 100 people interested in using the service. Fiona scrolls through the list on her phone, re-counting. “They just keep on coming,” she says.

Jardine Simpson, chief executive of the Scottish Recovery Consortium, says he is “encouraged” by the Scottish Government’s recognition of what the recovery community has to offer but agrees more support would help.

“If recognition of our effectiveness is backed up by resources, people with lived experience will lead the way in making recovery the norm for anybody who experiences problematic substance misuse,” he says.

“Each of us here today knows the power of human compassion. Each of us are passionate about making that power available to people still suffering problematic substance use and those in communities blighted by isolation, alienation, poverty and distress and desperation.”

It’s that passion that means they will get up early on Monday morning, to set up the chairs in the recovery cafes, listen and offer support and be the living proof that it’s possible to recover from addiction.