Holly Deane-Johns

I was using heroin on a daily basis for probably a year, a year and a half before it came out that I was an addict.

I was just a functioning, normal teenager who was an addict.

My mother was noticing that my moods were changing a lot, like sort of unstable.

And she actually thought I was having a breakdown at one stage, but I wasn't.

I was just on the drugs.

So she sent me away to a friend's house up north for a couple of weeks.

um about two two days into my stay I was like fuck this I got on a bus and went back to Perth uh the first thing I did was go to the backyard of my mum's house where I'd buried some heroin dug it up and started using again and yeah mum found out that I had left and I spoke to her on the phone and I said look you know this is what's going on and I told her what was her reaction

Oh, devastated, absolutely devastated because by that time she did know what it did to people and, you know, it had a hold on her.

So, yeah, she knew then what the story was, yeah, but it was too late.

Oh, yeah, look, definitely, you know.

It's, yeah, very dangerous shit, you know.

I was reading a poem a couple of nights ago that somebody had put on social media and, yeah,

The way it was worded was just so true.

First it takes your health, then it takes your home, then it takes your car, then it takes your job.

It just went as a domino effect, and it's so true.

You can be this high one minute and then just fucking lose everything in the next.

It's very scary what it does to people and families.

I did.

Fuck, how old was I?

I think I was about maybe 14, 14 or 15.