Group helps users shake ice addiction
Crystalline methamphetamine, also known as ice, is a life-shattering problem for addicts and their families in the Great Southern, but help is at hand.
An Albany-based man is using his past experience with the drug and his newfound sobriety to try to help others in the community struggling with ice addiction.
Jamie Coyne started Ice Breakers, a non-residential rehabilitation program facilitated at PCYC by himself and his grandmother, Margaret Gordon.
Mr Coyne said Ice Breakers had been running for three months, but a few weeks ago he started a support group for family members and friends of ice addicts.
The rehabilitation course runs over 12 weeks on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am-2.30pm, while the support group meets on the second and fourth Monday of every month at 7pm.
Mr Coyne said his past experience with drug abuse helped him connect with recovering addicts.
"I myself know full well the ins and outs of ice addiction as I had led a life of drugs and crime," he said.
"Ice will rob the user over time of their morals, their standards, their common sense and eventually everything that they once held dear."
Methamphetamine was used in various forms by almost 400,000 Australians in the past year, which was proportionally three to five times higher than in other English-speaking countries, including the US, Canada and the UK.
Mr Coyne said people who knew him had seen how he was and his transition into a drug-free world and hoped it inspired others to seek rehabilitation.
"Ice Breakers helps people out of the battle trenches of addiction and we walk alongside them through their recovery, teaching them tools for change so that they themselves can break free from their own personal hell," he said.
Contact Mr Coyne on Facebook via the Albany Against Meth page or drop in to an Ice Breakers meeting to learn more.
