After gaining extensive knowledge of drugs through my own addiction, work as a drug and alcohol counselor, and then as educator, author and therapist specializing in addiction, it became increasingly obvious to me that the existing drug recovery model badly needed updating.

Millions of people are saying, and will continue to say, ‘yes’ to drugs. The market is expanding into every demographic and country, yet the thinking on recovery has remained static. The old assumptions about youth, poverty, drugs and addiction are still in place. But these days drug-users are rich, poor, old, young, happy, unhappy, male, female, successful, failures, from broken homes and from happy homes.

Most of them take drugs not because there is anything wrong, but because on drugs they feel something ‘right’. So instead of fixating on the negative aspects of drug use and where drug-users got it wrong, I look at why they think it feels right. This provides something positive to work with and an opportunity to use drug-pasts to create a more productive future.

Recreational drug-users are drawn from the entire social spectrum but they do have in common an anti-authoritarian, adventurous spirit and exploratory nature with an interest in altered states of consciousness and we cater to this in our drug rehabilitation programs and the other services we offer.