George Charlton, a drug user for 15 years, overdosed on 'countless occasions' and was even sentenced to two years in a military prison as he tried to deal with childhood trauma. Now, he's helping other users get clean.
Anyone who is old enough remembers where they were onAt 28-years-old, he had no qualifications, and was, as he puts it, a ‘frequent flyer’ in the criminal justice system and mental health wards.
‘Opiates, amphetamines, gas, glue, I was taking anything I could get to deal with being a failure to deal my childhood traumas, I didn’t know how to get out of it,’ he added. ‘That shows you where my head was at – I wanted to get away from the drugs but brought some with me,’ says George. George studied counselling, got a masters in social sciences and health at Durham University then founded a handful of social enterprises helping drug users.
A big part of George’s work today is educating people about a drug called naloxone, which rapidly reverses the effects of an overdose on opioids – such as heroin. ‘You could put 10 naloxone kits into somebody who had no opioids in their system and it wouldn’t do anything to them. It might do something to you because you might get a punch in the head for doing it.’‘Typically if you want to volunteer and get involved in drug treatment organisations you have to be six months sober or six months clean,’ says George.
‘Our naloxone peers have privileged access to that client group – they’ve got that credibility, they can build really quick rapport,’ he says. ‘They both cried their eyes out, they were crying over the fact that people believed enough in them to let them be involved in this project,’ says George. George also hopes to change the narrative on drug users so they can become more actively involved in these kinds of projects
‘What a lot of the peers tell me is that by going out and saving the lives of other people with naloxone, their lives get saved too by this project,’ he says. In 2019 the government widened the scope on who can be given naloxone – in the face of continually rising opioid deaths
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