Over the least four months I have been trying to stop taking drugs.

The pattern has been that I get to roughly one month without drugs, then do something stupid like go out on a bender that sees me going out and then getting high. The thing is that the time it takes to recover is now much longer than it used to be.

With ecstasy, coming down normally took about four days, and I would be a bit spacey. But now the come down is much more pronounced. It messes with my emotions now, it really grinds me down. The same happens with coke- there have been a couple of times where it go so bad that I thought it would be easier to kill myself. Frightening.

When it got to those points, I decided that that was time for change. I have been off the wagon a couple of times since, and it has really hit me hard, but I am getting there. The trick is to ride through the storm, dust yourself off and learn from your mistakes. And every time I draw strength from it.

I am also trying to improve my outlook on life, by reading all manner of self-development books, and the majority of it is nonsense, but some of it really resonates and I keep getting better. Here is to the up-side.

But I have only just begun to realize how dangerous drugs are. All they do is over-stimulate your body's natural endorphins, drains the sources until there is little left in reserve. Things that you found naturally funny no longer are, comments are interpreted in a wrong way, and slowly you lose your sense of humour. The longer that happens, the more you need to use drugs just to get to the level you could have got to before you began to take them. And then you need them just to get up.

I am now terrified of drugs.