The day I almost died, and why it gave me hope I could change after years as a heroin addict
Brian Pennie’s gritty memoir tells how he ditched hard drugs
IN THE normal course of events, a reformed junkie and ex-heroin addict is possibly the last person we might consult for tips about winning in life, but Brian Pennie, whose memoir Bonus Time has just been published, is nothing if not persuasive about our powers of reinvention. Indeed his own life appears like a perfect parable against the last-chance saloon. In the seven years since the retired coalman’s son from Ladyswell, a working class estate in Dublin’s Blanchardstown, got clean from heroin after wasting 15 years of his life to chronic addiction, he has also found his way into the corporate world as a motivational speaker for blue chip clients like AIB and Eir.
To the gleaming boardrooms we can also add the hallowed halls of academe where the now 42-yearold has gained a degree in psychology, and lectures occasionally on wellness and addiction to students of Trinity College and UCD, while researching his PhD in neuroscience and mindfulness.
Not surprisingly perhaps, the man who fell so low that he used heroin freshly extracted from human orifices to get off his face now describes himself as the ‘happiest man I know’.
His degradation is over along with the long years of desperation when he was prepared to trade everything he held dear, from his mother’s love to his personal hygiene, in selfish and singleminded pursuit of his next hit.
Pennie doesn’t spare the reader any of the squalor of his former lifestyle, where he needed ‘a couple of benzos and some gear’ to just get out of bed and recklessly climbed the greasy pole of drug-dealing so that he was buying large quantities of cocaine from dangerous criminals rather than bags of gear from the local supplier.
In the event of his drug-fuelled exploits, seedy scenes of banging up and smoking smack and compulsive lying not reminding the reader of Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s bestseller, or indeed the eponymous film starring Ewan McGregor, Pennie points them in that direction on a few occasions.
‘The Trainspotting crew were serious addicts,’ he writes at one point as if trying to console himself. ‘My situation is completely different.’
The book ends on an optimistic note with Brian’s conviction that ‘it’s never too late. Everyone’s situation is different but second chances are all around us – you just have to look’.
First though the reader has to wade through the depressing story of a young man’s descent into drug addiction, the horrors of withdrawal, the delirium and cold sweat, not to mention the cast of low lifes, prepared to tolerate any bodily indignity or act of criminality short of murder, so that they can get stoned out of their heads and get the dealers off their backs.
Pennie’s raw and unflinching honesty is admirable but it is also born from his conviction that addicts are victims rather than knowing agents of their own destruction. ‘Most of them, like me, only use drugs to cope with something else in their life, usually trauma,’ he writes.
He maintains that his anxiety disorder began as an infant and he credits an operation for a twisted intestine, performed in those days without an anaesthetic, for causing him so much suffering that it upended his equilibrium. A watchful child, he worried continually about everything, from his parents’ weekend jaunts to the pub to his mother’s happiness.
He went to St Declan’s school in Cabra, north Dublin, a more academic and middle class school than the school attended by most of his friends in Ladyswell where, according to him, robbed cars, drugs and violence were ‘normal everyday events’.
Although he felt a bit of a misfit at school, he was a competitive boy, academically bright and good at sports until a knee injury caused his life to veer off course at 14.
Like many of his peers he started smoking cigarettes, liked them, and then graduated quickly on to hash. At 15 he got his kicks inhaling petrol fumes and by the time he hit sweet sixteen he was selling hash to fund his love of LSD, Valium, ecstasy, sleeping pills and anti-psychotics.
He progressed to methadone and from there, aged 17, to heroin which he immediately fell head-over-heels in love with. ‘I have never been able to resist heroin and, deep down, I knew I was in trouble from the very first day,’ he admits.
He ignored his inner voice warning him that heroin was a one-way ticket to annihilation and decided that he could avoid dependency if he just took heroin at weekends. Although his parents liked a drink
‘Pennie doesn’t spare the reader any of the squalor of his former lifestyle’
they were clueless about drugs, they had no idea that there were signs like dilated pupils of drug abuse.
‘When I look back I was a black belt in self-deception,’ he laughs. ‘I’d be with my methadone doctor, giving them a urine sample and bragging to them about how great my life was going and my next skiing holiday. I was so crazy and deluded and it wasn’t until 2013 that I stopped fighting like that with my mind.’
THE first time he admitted to himself that he might have a problem was in 2000 when he fled a New Year’s Eve party to score some drugs on his own. ‘I was a smart 22-year-old with a good job, great friends and a cool social life, even if it was a bit hectic. On the outside life looked great – surely I couldn’t be a drug
addict. Until this night, I didn’t think I was…’ he recalls.
But still his relationship with heroin was all-consuming: ‘What I’m certain of is this: on my first night chasing the dragon, heroin helped me to forget myself, anxiety left me. My busy mind went quiet and all my insecurities dissolved in an instant. And now I was back in the real world, struggling to cope. How could I live with my mental poverty, having tasted riches that were still within my reach?’
Fortunately for him, when he was 35 and his sister Anne thought he was at death’s door after watching him stumble and falter as he tried to shoulder a relative’s coffin into church, he was to discover an alternative source of mental enrichment.
‘I think I substituted books and learning for drugs. What saved me was I hooked my dopamine receptors onto a new drug – and that drug was learning. I’m still obsessed about learning. That’s okay, we call it “drive”. We don’t call it addiction any more,’ says Pennie today of the remarkable revelation that struck him in 2013, brought on by a convulsive seizure.
The seizure, which came about when he suddenly stopped taking drugs, caused him to bite his tongue down the middle and he ended up in hospital. While looking around the emergency room he assumed he was brain dead and a feeling of peace washed over him, driving out the familiar dread and panic. What looked like rock bottom was actually a moment of redemption and the key to him turning around his life.
‘That was the moment when the world completely changed. I was never really going to get clean until I had a seizure… My self identity was, “I can’t cope with anxiety, I need to take heroin”. The seizure cracked that shell, and it just opened the door to look at the world in another way. It just broke me mentally, emotionally and physically. It was like I was dead inside afterwards. There was nothing inside of me,’ he explains
Before that, a confluence of factors had caused Brian to seek help from his doctor. Firstly, the patience of the graphic design company that had employed him since he left school had finally evaporated and – after 17 years of observing his slow descent into hell, of the strange odour emanating from the darkroom where, unbeknown to his superiors, the popular and talented Pennie smoked heroin to his heart’s content, and of him falling asleep at his desk or during meetings – his bosses let him go.
His spiralling debts (Brian owed thousands to the bank, the credit union and unsavoury drug dealers in order to fund his €100 a day habit) and the diminishing returns from his ever escalating drug habit were also pivotal. But before he could undergo detox, his doctor told him that he would have to wean himself off benzodiazepine. Rather than gradually ease off the drugs, Brian decided to go cold turkey and he stopped taking the tablets overnight, which is against all medical advice.
After the seizure he was too exhausted to take drugs, so within several weeks the benzodiazepine had drained from his system and he could be admitted into a detox centre to come off heroin and methadone.
‘I was hardly two days clean and I had this huge shift in perspective; this joy came into my body, I can hardly explain it. I had this amazing energy and I was interested in the nature of suffering and emotions. I got big into mindfulness and Zen and psychology,’ he says.
HIS mission today is to harness his academic training to gain credibility as a leadership and self-development expert. His emphasis on living in the moment as opposed to the past or the future which give rise, he believes, to anxiety and depression, allows him to park his own past and any responsibility he might have for promoting the criminal underworld through drug dealing or, indeed, causing pain to his nearest and dearest.
‘People might think I should feel guilt but it’s a dangerous emotion as it psychologically attaches you to the past and you can do nothing about the past; I don’t feel guilt. I wish I could take what I did back but I can’t. Of course I’m a master of self deception, so I can’t rule out the possibility that I’m hiding from guilt.
‘But rationally I think that all I can do now is take action to help people. I want to help people who are disadvantaged and I want to tell young people not to worry about failure and to laugh at rejection. I have devised tools and systems to help youngsters become more aware of their emotional world and their principles and goals. I want to inspire people with the idea that great things are possible if they put in the work.
‘I’m the happiest person I know and I’m not even in a solid relationship. I’m back living with my brothers in Tyrrelstown, Dublin, until I can get my own place, yet sometimes I’m driving along and I am overwhelmed with happiness.’
‘What looked like rock bottom was actually a moment of redemption’
‘People might think I should feel guilt but it’s a dangerous emotion’
Brian’s memoir Bonus Time, published by Gill Books, is available now from Dubray Books and on Amazon Kindle and iBook