My descent into the meth trap: a professional woman's battle with ice

[poledriver]

My descent into the meth trap: a professional woman's battle with ice

From taking diet pills at 15 to an out-of-control ice addiction at 44, Virginia Perkins had a long history of swapping one bad habit for another, like a lot of addicts in denial.

This story, my story, is a very personal account of a lifetime of addiction. It is my one-sided account of how an otherwise regular life, characterised by drinking and recreational drug taking, disintegrated to the point where my sister threw me an intervention for my 44th birthday and I ended up in Odyssey House.

I grew up in the leafy northern beaches area of Sydney. I had a loving mum and dad and two younger sisters. We were a happy middle class Australian family. I had a difficult adolescence and spent it pushing my parents' boundaries.

I got my first job when I was nearly 15 years old and that's when I started buying recreational drugs. In those days you could buy high doses of pseudoephedrine over-the-counter in diet pills and I used to skip school at least two mornings a week to go to Manly or Dee Why and buy packets of 100 tablets. With a pocketful of disposable income, the pharmacy became my lolly shop for the next 20 years.

When I was nearly 16, in a fit of rebellion and much to the distress of my family, I left home. I met an 18-year-old man with a flat in the city and he taught me about illicit drugs, working hard, playing hard and living on the edge.

Even at that young age, I played the role of middle class, functional "recreational" user. I got work as a junior clerk for a stockbroker in those heady days of the late 1980s where I took my drug habit to a whole new level. I learnt to take cocaine before the market opened and relax with scotch and soda in the trendy bars of Oxford Street at night.

When my relationship ended, it was the wake-up call I needed to get out of the Sydney scene and I move to Canberra, where I was welcomed by my family, got a job in a bank and didn't touch illicit drugs for another 15 years.

I worked in Europe in the early 1990s, including for a British charity in Romania. While I was there, and despite intense homesickness, I came to know myself in a way that I hadn't before and realised that I liked working in challenging environments. I returned to Australia and quickly took up work in Pakistan where I worked with women and young people in minority religious communities.

It's fair to say that during those years I became a confident and assertive woman. I was proud of the work I was doing and the lifestyle I was living.

I still misused drugs and alcohol – binge drinking in Romania and being poured into a horse and cart to be taken home was an amusing dinner party anecdote. And the pharmacies in Lahore and Islamabad didn't need a prescription – amphetamines, opiates, benzodiazepines – they provided a cornucopia of delights for the informed 20-something expatriate.

Before I left Australia for Pakistan, I started seeing the man I subsequently married, a successful businessman 16 years my senior. He was also a functional alcoholic.

Read the full article -

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/my-de...l-womans-battle-with-ice-20150519-gh51v7.html

 

[SixBuckets]

I have no reason to doubt that this woman's story is true, as such, but a bunch of the timeline doesn't add up. It's highly possible she's just exaggerated dates in her narrative ("ten years" instead of like six and a half) and so on.

I do question her reporting of her role in the HIV sector, because we don't actually have remote Aboriginal communities where HIV is endemic in Australia.

Still, minor niggles.