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“If Oliver wants to lose weight,” his best mate says, “all he has to do is take off his bling and that’d be two and a half stone gone straight away!” Oliver can laugh about that sort of comment now, but there was a time when he might have reacted very differently, probably with a knife – a level of violence that had him first imprisoned, then transferred to a secure psychiatric hospital. He’s been inside, one way or another, for the last five and a half years, and he’s still only twenty-five. He’s well on his way back to the world at large now, undeniably a changed person, and can talk honestly and movingly about his past and his hopes for the future. Oliver started smoking cannabis when he was 14 and very soon found that he could make good money to support his habit by dealing. His drug taking escalated to Es and amphetamines, and he dealt in heroin and crack-cocaine as well. In the murky and dangerous world he inhabited, violence was rife and Oliver was in there amongst them, living by the law of an urban jungle - attack or be attacked. He was finally convicted for knifing another dealer – a dealer to whom he owed lots of money and he thought was after his blood. He was almost certainly right. Life in the psychiatric hospital was tough. Oliver’s history meant he had to be escorted wherever he went, and with so many people ‘kicking off’ staff were in short supply so he rarely went out of his living quarters. |
He recalls that each day he was allowed to walk three times round the outside of his bungalow and that was that. No illicit drugs available, but nothing much to occupy his mind, keep him active or move him forward in his life. It was a breakthrough for Oliver when he was transferred to a Cambian hospital , dedicated to intensive psychiatric rehabilitation, and he’s very clear in his mind how his new environment has helped him over the past two years or so. When he visited for the first time, his mum thought she’d like to move in as well, it was so lovely! Apart from learning how to cook, what Oliver values most is the time he’s spent with a psychologist learning about the drugs he used to take, and the effect they had on him and his mental health. Together they have pinned down the triggers that might tempt him to take drugs once he’s back in his own community – forewarned is forearmed. He can now understand how and why things went so badly wrong for him. But forget drugs! Oliver has very different plans for his future. He wants to move into an area away from his former home so that he has a chance to start a new life. He’d like to find a girlfriend and have a baby boy. Best of all, he is determined to ‘put something back,’ as he describes it. He wants to become a drugs counsellor, advising lads just like himself – or rather, just like he used to be.
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