Katy Jones
‘The desperation for the drug came real quick,’ says Jay O’Brien. The former Paremoremo inmate is sitting in the office of a well-appointed private drug and alcohol rehab centre, where he now works in Nelson, set among vineyards and distant mountains.
It’s a far cry from the prison cells the 47-year-old called home for much of his adult life, driven by an obsession with methamphetamine.
‘‘Once I’d got onto meth, everything was just about the meth. It was about getting more and having more,’’ O’Brien reveals with unbridled candour.
Two years ago, after his addiction stripped him of his home, business and family, he finally found the help he needed to stay off the drug.
Begging for P
O’Brien first got hooked on meth in Auckland’s Mount Eden Prison about 20 years ago, while doing time for car theft.
He’d never seen the drug before, he said, but it soon became ‘‘a constant’’.
‘‘It was rife in the prisons. It was coming in over the walls at that stage. It was literally shoe boxes coming over, taped up with five or six cell phones and two or three ounces of methamphetamine, six ounces of marijuana.’’
He first started smoking crystal meth with other inmates, while carrying out cleaning duties.
‘‘There were five or six of you and you’d stay up in the wing, do your cleaning, go into the showers often backwards and forwards, having a puff, leaving the pipe there. With meth, it was such a social thing too, that’s the problem with that drug ... it’s in the circles.’’
The morning ritual quickly became a habit that needed feeding day and night.
‘‘Just that wanting it and craving it. I could do lines before that [of speed], or smoke pot, and have control over it, whereas meth, once it’s got you, you can’t stop puffing it. The craving for it is constant.’’
With the addiction, came the well-documented side effects.
‘‘At first you just don’t sleep, it was lots of little things that you didn’t know about came along. The irritability, then the craving for it, then the wanting it all the time.’’
‘‘Your staunchness went, your pride went, because you weren’t shy on begging for the stuff. For me, you could see the whole scene of jail changing; if you had meth you were ok, it didn’t matter what you were in for.’’
Feeding the habit
Being released on home detention didn’t stand in the way of a habit that ‘‘was through the roof.’’ Mates simply brought the drug to him.
A few months after the bracelet was off, O’Brien was back in prison.
‘‘For the same stuff, doing the same crimes, just to feed the habit. That went on for 10 or 11 years, in and out of prison. I was a prolific car thief and ram raider.’’
Ram raiding (driving a vehicle through a shop front) became a means to an end of getting what the meth cooks wanted, with more of them demanding items like specific brands of shoes and clothes, he said.
‘‘At the end of the day, people don’t want a big asset because police will come and take it, it looks hot. They give you a list, like a shopping list.’’
As the assets demanded by ‘‘P’’ cooks got smaller, the number of crimes he needed to commit to afford his meth habit increased.
‘‘Instead of having to do one or two earns a week, you’re having to do 50, and that’s not exaggerating.’’
His continued offending saw him incarcerated in Paremoremo maximum security jail. But a turning point came in 2006, when, aged 34, O’Brien was released, just after his daughter had turned 18 months.
‘‘I thought I don’t want that for her.’’
When his application for rehab in Auckland was declined, he took matters into his own hands. ‘‘They said I was too set in my criminal ways. So I did it myself. I was already clean when I got out, and I just thought I’m just going to keep this way.’’
He managed to stay clean for nine years, until tragedy struck.
‘It just destroys you’
When his four-year-old son was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in 2014, O’Brien turned back to the drug.
‘‘That sent me and my partner down a bad place and we started using meth, and after three months of using meth, I was back in prison. I spent eight months of 2015 coming in and out, back in that revolving thing of bail, back into jail, offending.
For the first time, O’Brien considered ending his life.
‘‘My partner and I were at war. We were separated, we had CYFS involvement ... There was no money for the family to eat. You name it, meth took it from me and took it from my family. That’s not me being a victim, that’s what it did.
‘‘It takes huge amounts of money to have a meth habit and it takes a lot to keep it up, and it just destroys you. You can’t keep up.’’
His children were left in shock by the speed at which their world collapsed.
‘‘One minute they had dad that was always at home and had a business, and everything was going really well. Suddenly me and the mumwere fighting and there was just huge dramas, it was like a mini tornado had hit their lives.
‘‘And for my partner who hadn’t been on meth before, it just took her out real quick, she didn’t even know what she was up to or what she was doing.’’
There seemed to be no way out, O’Brien said.
‘‘I couldn’t see the end to it all; I was back in jail, the cops were on my case again. Even though I’d been out of trouble for nine years. It was the worst place I’d ever got myself into.’’
Then he was thrown a lifeline; a place on the Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Court, being piloted in Auckland.
Taking the panic out of life
‘‘I can’t believe how much I owe drug court, for taking that risk with me. Because even when I was 34 or 35 I couldn’t get a rehab to look at me, so for them to take a risk on me at my age, it was a big risk for them with my history,’’ he conceded.
O’Brien spent six months in residential rehabilitation through the court process, and over a year in rehab programmes, before being offered a job by the Turning Point drug and alcohol addiction treatment centre in Auckland.
When the centre’s owner opened a facility in Nelson last year, he relocated his family here.
‘‘The normal court system doesn’t give you any say, you’re in trouble and that’s it. In between the court cases there’s nothing done to help you. With drug court, there’s court every week for the first month and every month for the next six months.
‘‘The life in recovery is just totally different to even when you’re just going on the straight and narrow. You follow a good programme, you get up early. You take the panic out of life’’
After so many years of taking from others, O’Brien says, he can finally give back to the community and his family, who now have ‘‘the best version’’ of him. To watch the video, go to stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail