It Started With One Little Line. Then It Was Cocaine And Cocktails. Bethany Tried To Hide Her Secret From Her Family… But In Just A Few Years Lost Everything. This Is How She Stopped

Crawling around my bedroom floor, I scanned the carpet for any traces of white powder. Desperate to get high, but unable to get hold of my dealer – to whom I already owed hundreds of pounds – I’d resorted to humiliating measures.

It was a low moment among many during my six years of a cocaine addiction that gradually robbed me of my career, my looks and my self-respect. At my worst point, I even attempted taking my life.

I now barely recognise that 28-year-old woman. But then I was blinded to everything but where and when I’d get my next hit.

It’s hard to believe it was a single line of the drug taken ‘for fun’ with a friend that saw me spiral. However, in my experience, that’s how so many women get pulled into addiction’s clutches.

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After nine months of Cocaine Anonymous meetings, I’ve heard various stories from women – many of them mums, and ranging from their 20s to 50s – about how what began as social lubrication turned into a life-destroying addiction.

Dinner parties, mums’ coffee mornings, offices, bars – cocaine is everywhere that women gather. And, between 2023 and 2024, female deaths involving cocaine use rose by 28 per cent.

It was summer 2019 when I first took cocaine, aged 23. Although I enjoyed drinking when socialising, I’d never touched drugs. I didn’t know anyone who took them and, quite honestly, they scared me.

However, I’d recently made a new friend and, while on a night out near my home in Manchester, she offered me a line in the toilets.

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My heart was thumping but she seemed so vibrant, outgoing and, crucially, presented cocaine as both cool and perfectly normal. I wanted to fit in with her glamorous social circle – who had all been using cocaine since their university days with no seeming ill-effects – and so, curious if scared, I said yes.

It’s a decision I would come to bitterly regret.

I couldn’t believe the immediate effect. I felt energised, happy and self-confident – in contrast to my naturally anxious, shy personality. I danced, I laughed, I felt like a version of myself I’d never been before and, because I drank far less than usual, the next morning I didn’t even have a hangover.

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And so, I found myself becoming one of the UK’s thousands of ‘social’ Class A drug users. A line or two soon became as normal as a couple of cocktails.

I didn’t even have to buy it myself, as my alluring new friendship circle were generous with their small bags of white powder.

When I used it – always with friends, never alone – cocaine brought a sense of peace and sureness I’d never felt before. We all had jobs, nice homes, good lives. It never crossed my mind that someone like me could become an addict.

But in late 2020, than a year after taking that first line, I began a relationship with a guy who also used cocaine – and he had access to a dealer. We started to take it together on nights in as well as out.

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A mid-week pub quiz, a takeaway on a Friday night, even going to the cinema – if I was being sociable, I wanted to be high. As 2021 progressed, I was using regularly – still always with others, though – and had started buying the drug myself. Looking back, I can see this was when things slid out of control.

My relationship soon ended, but I carried on using. The effects of my drug habit began to creep into areas of my life – including time with family. Be it a Sunday meal or a birthday celebration, if I didn’t use, I’d feel lethargic and paranoid. I’d always been close to my parents, but now I isolated myself from them.

And the comedowns were becoming horrific. My erratic moods raised my parents’ concern, but when they asked me if I was taking drugs I’d react with lies and fury. I was an adult, entitled to my own private life – how dare they question me?

I started to take cocaine alone: in my bedroom and my car. There was no pretending this was a ‘social’ habit any , yet I remained in denial.

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I was working freelance in social media management, but I was always either high or on a crushing come down. By 2023, I began to lose clients because I wouldn’t turn up or the quality of my work wasn’t good enough.

Work soon became impossible. With no income at all, I successfully applied for Universal Credit. I was spending £500 a month on cocaine, but letting my phone bill and car insurance go unpaid – and racking up hundreds of pounds of debt with my dealer. But even as everything else crumbled around me, getting cocaine was still the priority.

I didn’t care that my relationship with my parents was in tatters, and the only friends I spent time with were fellow users. I’d become totally selfish and looked haggard. My skin was grey, my eyes dull, my hair limp and oily, and I gained weight from eating rubbish food when I was on a come down.

By 2024, I couldn’t even go to the cinema without disappearing to the loo several times to use, needing greater and frequent quantities to feel the high I craved. Yet I still didn’t recognise I was an addict.

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But I was deteriorating, and when a close friend died that December, I hit emotional rock bottom. Two months later, I attempted to take my own life and was later sectioned.

But in trying to end my life, I ended up saving it – I finally admitted to my shell-shocked family what had been going on for the past six years. Even though they’d strongly suspected I’d been using drugs, they had no idea to what extent.

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importantly, I finally recognised I was an addict – and that I needed help.

At first, I felt enormous relief unburdening myself of my secret. Yet, still in full grip of addiction, I also experienced regret and panic that my cocaine use was now out in the open – making it harder for me to use again. I felt torn between wanting to break away from the drug and giving in to its call.

I was discharged from the hospital and began having therapy and attended Cocaine Anonymous meetings, too. I was stunned by the people I met there – professionals, parents, and many of them women. Just normal people like me who’d been sucked into addiction.

Recovery is incredibly difficult. I have relapsed several times, most recently just last month. I have been honest with my therapist and family about it, and also shared it on social media, where I am open about my recovery in a bid to keep myself accountable.

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Since sharing my recovery, I’ve had hundreds of online messages from women currently or formerly addicted to cocaine. There are so many of us out there.

Now 29, I’m slowly healing and want my story to give hope to other women. To the many who believe they can control their cocaine use, as I once did, believe me when I say it’s not worth it.

That line at a dinner party, a hit on a big night out… it may take years for it to spiral out of your control and for you to reach your rock bottom, but you will.

Cocaine destroys lives. Don’t sacrifice your friends, family, job and finances for it.

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As told to EIMEAR O’HAGAN