“They want to hurt you,” says Anne Buckley. “You can see it in them. You know people are looking at you but it’s not you. They’re looking at something else. They’re not seeing you. They call you a ‘junkie’. There is judgment, stigma, hatred.”
Anne Buckley is a 41-year-old journalism student who presents a powerful and polemical documentary on this country’s drug problem, My War on Drugs, this Wednesday on TV3. She is uniquely qualified to do this, having come out of 17 years of addiction just six years ago.
Buckley believes that a lot of the addiction in this country stems from a mix of trauma and deprivation. For her, the traumas were many. She had heart surgery when she was 10. The same year her eight-year-old brother Mark drowned in the canal.
“We didn’t talk about it. There was no help. I got to see him in the coffin. The nurse put a little chair down for me to climb up and kiss him. I remember kissing him and touching his hair. I remember his body was all bloated from the water…. That leaves a mark on you.
“I often think about how Whitney Houston’s daughter died the same way as [she did]. I can understand that. I used to lie in bed and want to know what it was like to drown. So I used to imagine myself drowning and think of what he went through. I wanted to be there in the water and to hold him.”
Source: Patrick Freyne, The Irish Times, 27/01/18
Safer Student Nights
eBulletin
Poll
