relationship with his little boy and hoping he will soon join hannah s son here for overnight stays, making it a properfamily home. for mike, dame carol s visit here is a unique opportunity. mike introduced himself. he has been with us through service, volunteering, the discovery academy. it s not every day the lad from birkenhead gets to tell his story in person to the government s most important drugs advisor. it is my two year birthday today. i am two years clean and sober today. i have got a real passion for this and i really want to help people. what was your problem? drugs or alcohol? both. alcohol and drugs were hand in hand for me. they saved my life and from volunteering i applied for a job, and now i am recovery co ordinator for the non opiate team. fantastic. that makes me very happy. dame carol is happy because mike s story is one of hope. perhaps most importantly, it shows others caught
there are plenty in birkenhead who regard dave as a lifesaver. he has been there and done it. it s always nice to hold onto where i was and what i ve got now. he commands respect because he cares for people like mike. it was obvious he was a different person then than when you speak to him now, because he was in pain. you could see it. he couldn t necessarily look you in the eyes, you know. he was kind of talking to you, head down. once you put all these things in place and get a hold of this, and making those changes, he started to lift his head up, he looked at you when he talked to you, started to like himself more. he didn t like himself. a lot of people who come to these doors don t. hannah, you are guiding me
no going back. if you did have a slip, would one slip be a catastrophe? yeah. one slip would kill me. seriously? seriously. genuinely, seriously, one slip would kill me, because i would feel like there would be no going back. broken promises again, this is the thing i have tried to understand with the academy about finding your values, your core values. to me that s scary because you re setting your own bar so high, you re incredibly tough on yourself. yeah, i need to be. you need to be disciplined. and if i m not disciplined, i ll fall. at birkenhead, mike s not the only one who s been struggling. just across the mersey from liverpool, this place took the full force of the 1980s recession. as the shipyards failed, unemployment rose and heroin and other drugs took hold. birkenhead is a deprived area
the sort of place we know can be especially vulnerable to drug and alcohol problems. but this is a community which is fighting back. and here in birkenhead they ve come up with this concept of a recovery village. what is that? a recovery village? well, there are already loads of different services here working to help people struggling with addiction, but now they re working together in much closer cooperation, so the rehab hub, the recovery cafe down here, and the place where groups meet for mutual support round the corner, they re all working in really close co ordination to get people off the drink and off the drugs. it is organisations coming together, as a collective on the wirral to work with a kind of shared goal. so we will do this test for you today. one of the main players here is wirral ways, a drug and alcohol service, and they re right at the heart of the recovery village. it s notjust another person that is coming in, it s an individual and that individual has got their o
and stuff, but he got out - of a routine, then that took you a step back from not i sticking to a routine, i but he has been good. you ve identified it, haven t you? - yeah. and corrected it. have you been low, mike? yeah, i have had moments of depression and moments of being down and that can creep up at any time. you could have the greatest day and something that happens is, like, oh, what if i could do that? what if i could have a drink? it s the first 30 seconds, but then it s about realising, back to reality sort of thing and then, boom, you know where you need to be. it s march and andrew is welcoming a vip visitor to birkenhead. shipbuilding was closing. young people didn t see a future. literally, in some estates in birkenhead, were some of the first places where the heroin epidemic started. we ve been telling dame carol black, the country s top independent advisor on tackling drug misuse, about the recovery village here.