on: Address Addiction; Address Homelessness
Hi lovely Reader.
Thanks for joining me again this week. I have been thinking recently about the homelessness epidemic that is predicted to hit Britain as winter comes, eviction notices are given, and people cope with new vulnerabilities following a rough economic year.
John, a past addict and homeless man, now a thriving college student and future electrician, helped me to put a face to a name and get a clearer picture on the issues of addiction and homelessness. Hope you find the conversation as helpful as I did.
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Lauren
‘I never completed anything in my life, until now.’ John was kind enough to give me 45 minutes of his time to talk about his experience of homelessness and addiction. I started the conversation thinking that I would primarily be finding out what it was like to live on the streets of London, but John had insight that drove the conversation toward what it was like to live with addiction.
‘I didn’t worry about having a home; drugs came first.’ John started using drugs when he was a young kid. It spiralled into a heavy addiction that helped him to escape his abusive father-in-law, who made him eat on the floor with the dogs and physically abused him. He never felt loved, and brutalised his body with drugs to drown out the pain and rejection. He found himself between living in a prison and living on the streets.
Often, people pass a man, homeless and high on the streets, and make automatic assumptions about the choices that put him there, easily ignoring the trauma that led them to that moment. It is reported by the National Institute of Health that more than a third of children that have experienced abuse or neglect will have a substance abuse disorder before they turn 18. John’s experience of addiction is no surprise. During childhood, when his brain was forming, John felt unsafe and unloved, which would have affected his cognitive, behavioural and social development, and most likely led to addiction.
It is thought that roughly two thirds of homeless people are also addicts. When I asked John what would have helped him to get off the streets when he was sleeping rough, he told me, ‘There was nothing anyone could have done because I didn’t want to change.’ Hard truth to hear when charities and government would hope to get people off the streets. But John explained that he didn’t mind sleeping rough when he was wrapped up in drugs. Even if he had been given a property, he doubts he would have maintained it between the money he needed for drugs and the criminality that led him to purchase them. ‘The bigger issue is the drug issue, not being homeless.’
In 2018, 234,101 people were in treatment for drug use in England and Wales, with the most used drugs being opioids, cocaine, benzodiazepines, MDMD, ecstasy, and ketamine. In England, it is estimated that there are 586,780 dependent drinkers. It is widely suspected that this number would have gone up following heavy home drinking during lockdown. Addiction to substances isn’t uncommon in the UK and if we are to avoid future cases of homelessness and deaths, we must continue to understand how to treat addiction.
After spending a ten year stint in prison, John was released with a £42 discharge grant and given no support in regards to housing. In the UK, prison leavers used to have priority for council housing – most likely to avoid re-offending – but this priority no longer exists, which often encourages prison leavers into their old habits and practices to survive. It leaves leavers without any foundation to build a new life upon. However, John had made up his mind in prison that he respected himself enough to change. He booked into a drug treatment centre and didn’t look back. He has been clean for four years and is looking to train as an electrical engineer.
When I inquired as to the most helpful steps to get clean from addiction, he quickly replied, ‘First, you must have a desire to change.’ He told me how he hit several rock bottom moments, but none of them enough to inspire the mindset shift that would lead to change. And then comes the hard work – self-evaluation, therapy, and NA or AA meetings. John described this process as painful as he rehashed all of the people, himself included, that he hurt when he was addicted. But he had a group of friends and services that gathered around him to cheer him on and give him hope. Beam is a social enterprise which crowdfunds for homeless people trying to get into work. John spoke highly of their support to get him trained as an electrical engineer and give him the gift of work, which has given him a sense of purpose.
It’s easy to take faces away when homelessness and addiction are mentioned. Easy to clump everyone into the same category. But each homeless man, each addicted woman – have unique stories that have led to their present circumstances. They are multi-faceted individuals that have mothers, favourite foods, talents, and fears. Instead of being vilified or pitied, they need hope, community, and purpose - just like every other human being.