Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What childhood experiences shaped Holly's life?
Heroin. We all know the name. And we all know it's bad. We're all taught that taking it just that one time can have catastrophic consequences. But still, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, an estimated 10.6 million people around the world are using opioids, including heroin, right now.
That is roughly the entire population of Sweden, or Portugal, or the entire state of Michigan. Opioids, including heroin, account for more than two-thirds of all drug-related deaths on the planet. Over 100,000 people a year. Gone. Not from violence, not from accidents, from a substance that began its life as a flower.
Now, if you're one of the lucky ones who isn't killed by it, then your life will almost certainly be destroyed by it. Debts start to mount, functioning society becomes almost impossible, and you can very quickly spiral out of control. Hello, hello. Hi, how are you going? Good, how are you, Holly? Yeah, good.
Holly Dean Johns would be one of those 10.6 million people who became addicted to the drug. It took hold of her life and ultimately sent her on a path of self-destruction.
That night was the beginning of the end for me. I didn't know it at the time, but that's exactly what it was.
One which culminated in a devastating sentence in a Thai prison.
As we were walking to the car, I made out I was going to run to see what they'd do. They pulled their guns and they said, we will shoot you.
before we even get to that wild story we first have to go back to holly's incredible childhood because i am willing to bet it is unlike any you've heard before a childhood to most people that would seem crazy but to holly at the time it all seemed well pretty normal for a while
moon in the sky i'm looking at the moon in the sky it shouldn't come as a surprise but i can't sleep war in my mind i'm trying to fight a war in my mind i don't know who's the winner tonight but it ain't me
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Chapter 2: How did Holly's family business transition to an escort agency?
So there was always heroin in the house, usually just had an ounce of heroin sitting around. At that stage, I was the one, like say if we got an ounce of heroin, I was the one that would go into a bedroom, tip it out, cut it, put it in packages, all that type of thing. So I was doing that on my own. That became a good thing for me because when I did start using, I would take some out for myself.
Nobody knew I was a heroin addict for a long, long time.
MUSIC
This transition from family real estate business to escort agency and then ultimately heroin dealing feels like it happened in the blink of an eye. And Holly says it really did happen very quickly and just continued to spiral. And in fact, the penultimate moment in Holly's life came when her mum would finally allow her to try heroin for the first time at around just 15.
You know, I would ask her very often when she was having a snore, I'd say, Mum, can I try it? And she's like, no. And she said no for a very long time. And I asked again one night and she said, okay, yeah, try it. And... Little did I know that trying it that one time, that just fucked me. That night was the beginning of the end for me.
I didn't know it at the time, but that's exactly what it was. And I like to make this clear as well because when I tell this story, you know, people tend to put a lot of shit on my mum, like, oh, what a fucked parent, you know, blah, blah, blah. We were so naive about all this type of stuff. If my mother had have known...
what that night of having that snort would do to me there's no way in the world she would have said yes it's just she wouldn't um we just didn't know about it we didn't know what would happen we didn't know about the addiction and and all that thing you know these days it's very openly talked about especially meth addiction now you know back in my day it was heroin um but it wasn't talked about like it is today so yeah like we had no idea what what would happen
So as we already mentioned at the start of this episode, heroin is not a niche problem. It's not confined to the margins of society either, not the dark corners, not the forgotten neighborhoods. It is everywhere. In the last 30 years, the global death toll from drug use has more than doubled, from around 61,000 deaths per year in 1990 to over 137,000 deaths a year in 2021.
Not because more people are using drugs than ever before, but because the drugs themselves have become more lethal. Because the systems designed to help people escape addiction have not kept pace. Behind every one of those numbers is a family. Mother, a father, a child, a person who started somewhere. A house, a suburb, a single moment in time.
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Chapter 3: What role did heroin play in Holly's life growing up?
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.
MUSIC PLAYS
Chapter two, the criminal code of silence. It's just wild how quickly a family can go from being, again, air quotes, normal to, you know, that situation. It's just, it's incredible. And, I mean, drugs have got a lot to answer for.
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.
Did you ever get in trouble with the police when you were a youngster?
I did. Fuck, how old was I? I think I was about maybe 14, 14 or 15. The police raided our house and there was some methamphetamine of my brother's that my mum had and I grabbed it out of mum's hand and I put it in my pocket because I thought they're not there for me, they're not going to, you know, search me. They did. They found it.
And I went to a youth detention facility, but I got bailed out that night. So I didn't stay there overnight.
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Chapter 4: How did Holly become addicted to heroin?
I guess, you know, if I'm really honest about it, I did have a lot of anger that I had to be this person. I'm a kid, but I've got responsibilities of an adult. I'll say, yeah, 100% I was angry. I didn't know it at the time, but I definitely was.
So Holly is serving her 18-year prison sentence, a sentence she got because of heroin, the drug she continued to use while in prison, a drug that had already taken so much from her and was about to take even more.
I was a year into my sentence at this stage and I got called up to the office and said, there's a phone call for you. Well, that just doesn't happen unless it's bad news. A friend said, your mother is dead. She died of a heroin overdose. At the time, my younger sister was in jail with me as well. We got the option to either go and view her body or go to the funeral.
We both chose to go to the funeral and we said goodbye to our mother handcuffed to a screw. So that was pretty traumatic because mum was everything to us. She was just everything. And to think of getting out of jail and her not being there, yeah, that was really, really hard.
Eventually, Holly gets released and placed on a six-month work release program designed for her to give back through voluntary work. and all the while constantly being tested for drugs. If she returns a positive result, it's straight back to prison. So she stays clean for the entire six months.
But as soon as it's over, she's back to heroin and making plans to head to Thailand, where her husband was.
Well, what ended up happening was when those two got busted, my... My husband, he was meant to ring me that night just to make sure everything had gone okay, you know. So when all the police were running at me, I had time to put my hand in my handbag and switch my phone off because I knew doing that, when Stephen rung and the phone was off, he would know something was wrong.
So when I got to jail, I got a message to him not to come back. because my lawyer had told me he would end up serving about three times whatever I was serving. So I knew then that I was doing five. So the message I got to him was stay there, don't come back, because why should two of us be in jail? I'm already in jail.
So after my work release finished, I got on a plane and went straight over to Thailand to be with him.
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