MARTIN Duffy, now in his fifties and in recovery from drug addiction, who has always been political – interested in “the history of humanity” – but he remembers 9/11 and the Iraq War as if viewed through a fog.

“I understood what was happening but I couldn’t process the emotional impact,” he says. That, he claims, was the effect of methadone. It saved him from heroin addiction. But it also claimed 10 years of his life in which he became isolated and withdrawn.

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He first started taking drugs following the death of his father when he was just 14, “suffering from grief that I couldn’t process”. Talented at school, but denied the opportunity to go to university, he became a bricklayer and lived a functional life but continued to “self-medicate” with drugs.

But further traumatic events led to stronger drugs – this time Temgesic, a prescription brand of the opiate buprenorphine, and his addiction spiralled leaving him homeless, in and out of hostels. “I got attacked in the town one night,” he remembers, “a guy tried to kill me”. He had a fractured skull and was hospitalised.

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“When I came out, I decided to change my life. I didn’t know about recovery. I just thought if I stopped the drugs everything else would fall into place.”

And for a while it did. Within a few years he had gone from living in a hostel to studying print making at Glasgow School of Art.

“But as I was doing my degree show something traumatic happened to me that would have broken anyone”. He says he can’t talk about that, other than to say it led him to heroin addiction.

He dropped out of art school, started seeking out bigger and bigger hits until, after four years, he could take it no longer. “I went to my GP and I told him I had a problem,” he says. “He said: 'You’re a bit old to be a junkie’. He didn’t ask about my circumstances, just assumed I had been an addict for years.

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"He said he was going to send me to the Community Addiction Team (CAT) to get methadone and I’d be on it for the rest of my life. He couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

“His reaction made me feel suicidal. I felt worthless. I just thought it would quicker and easier if I killed myself. But the CAT team were brilliant with me and put me on methadone.

"There was no funding for rehab – that wasn’t even suggested. But that immediately stopped me using heroin. It was a transformation. And for a while I loved methadone because it took me out of that drug scene.”

He soon found there were down sides. “I also had depression – I did ask the doctor and the CAT team to refer me to counselling or a psychologist but they wouldn’t touch me because I had an addiction. By that time the addiction was to methadone. So the only treatment I got was anti-depressants and I became totally isolated.”

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His world shrunk to daily trips to queue outside the chemist for methadone, which meant everyone knew about his addiction, he says. His kids were bullied as a result, and apart from trips with them to the park or museums, he withdrew from the community.

He stopped making art or playing guitar and found himself unable to work and on benefits for the first time, trapped in a vicious cycle of being kicked off Employment Support Allowance (ESA), appealing and winning, being reassessed and losing it all over again.

“I internalised all the stigma,” he says. “I was disgusted at myself for having got myself in that position. And what ESA was doing to me, I began to think I kind of deserved it.”

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And then in 2012, after 10 years of living in the fog, he collapsed. Extensive hospital tests revealed he had Hep C, a blood-borne virus probably contracted when he was homeless, which he regarded as a death sentence.

“When the CAT team heard they took me to [charity] Addaction,” he said. “I was very reluctant because I had lost the power of communicating with people and I didn’t really see the need. But then I found out there was a cure for Hep C and it gave me a wee bit of hope.”

At Addaction he saw counsellors for the first time, got classes in drug recovery and learned about depression. They told him about drug fellowships and supported his decision to come off methadone before taking the invasive Hep C treatment.

People there believed in his worth. “They made me a volunteer when I was still on a [methadone] script, which meant they trusted me,” he says.

“I found out I had a talent for public speaking. Someone asked me to speak at one of the conferences and I found out that loved it. I did two huge conferences for the NHS in Hampden – hundreds of GPs and doctors. I told them they need to work together because it was only through that that people will get recovery.” Now he puts much of his time into volunteering with the recovery community.

He wishes Buvidal had been around when he was looking for help, believes he would not have wasted 10 years before seeking out help with the root causes. “If you have a breakdown, normally, in a civilised society you would go for treatment and cared for. But we have been demonised and I felt that right down to my toes,” he says.

Now life is good – he’s looking for a job, is teaching guitar and “playing the blues to cheer myself up”, he laughs. “It is a completely different life. I am a different human being.”