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When Hannah Viney hit ‘rock bottom’ together with her cocaine dependancy final 12 months, she was once bingeing ‘for three or four days each week and putting drugs before everything else’. Her £124,000-a-year inside design trade had failed two years sooner than as a result of she couldn’t stay alongside of the paintings. She was once making what cash she may just as a cleaner. ‘By the end, I was using four times a week, going without sleep and food for days at a time. I had extreme exhaustion – I was barely getting through the first two days after each bender – my skin was bad, my hair was falling out. Basically, I couldn’t serve as.’ Her dependancy is a long way from unusual. According to the Office for National Statistics, there have been 1,118 deaths involving cocaine registered in 2023, 30.5 consistent with cent upper than the former 12 months.
Viney as soon as crashed her automobile whilst sleep-deprived. Most of her relationships in London, the place she had lived and labored from the age of 20, had damaged down. Her lowest second got here final March: staying at her oldsters’ Oxfordshire house whilst they had been on vacation, she went on a four-day bender of booze and medication. ‘I had no other way of dealing with my emotions, other than drugs. It was four days of psychosis and loneliness.’
By the time her brother and cousin discovered her accidentally – they had been webhosting a dinner on the area – she had handed out in her early life bed room. ‘My brother started crying, it was a difficult moment, I still find it hard to speak about.’
Viney was once a part of a drug-using neighborhood in the United Kingdom that will get thru an estimated 117 lots of cocaine every year (in step with the National Crime Agency) and is the largest marketplace in Europe. But that four-day binge at her early life house served as a turning level in her drug dependancy, and the following day Viney went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous assembly. ‘I eventually started going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, too. For the first six weeks of my recovery, I barely spoke to anyone. I went to meetings every day. I cried, came home and that was it. Those weeks were hell.’
Viney, now 31, is telling me her tale after a 12 months of sobriety. When I meet her on Zoom, she is affable, chatty and lovely, with top cheekbones and messed up blonde hair. She has additionally, a lot to her marvel, transform vastly widespread as TikTok’s cocaine agony aunt, with 155okay fans and 2.4 million likes (@hannahameliaviney). She isn’t a educated therapist, despite the fact that she’s discovered that it’s her anecdotes and disarming openness that resonate with audience. ‘I get hundreds of messages each day from people who want to talk about their drug use,’ she says.
Her first video was once posted simply 3 months after she were given sober. ‘Initially, I started posting because I wanted to show real-time recovery, every single day,’ she explains. ‘I wanted to talk about my experiences, what I was feeling. Having the TikTok feed also helped to keep me accountable. I just never expected it to be so immediately popular.’
The podcast she introduced final summer time, Class A People – on which she interviews fellow getting better addicts – had 12 million listeners within the first 3 months of broadcasting; the dependancy charity Turning Point has transform her first sponsor and she or he is talking at Glastonbury Festival this June.
Hannah, 31, who has 155,000 fans on TikTok, has been sober for greater than a 12 months
Viney’s drug downside started when she moved to London in 2014 elderly 20. She were given a task as an property agent in West London the place she was once one of the most youngest folks in an workplace of 27- and 28-year-olds. Cocaine is so normalised within the capital, she says, it was once ‘everywhere’. Trying to slot in at paintings, she would frequently cross to her managers’ properties to do traces of cocaine together with her colleagues.
While she would max out her overdraft each month, she’s reluctant to speak about precisely how a lot she was once taking or spending. ‘Something I’ve learnt since getting sober is that it’s unhelpful to different addicts as a result of they may learn this and assume, “Oh, well,
I don’t do that amount, therefore I’m not an addict” or “I don’t do that, therefore I don’t have a problem.”’ But it was once ‘a lot – by the end of my using, I shouldn’t in point of fact have survived’. In phrases of cash, ‘I probably could have bought two houses with the amount I spent,’ she says. Picking up medication had transform 2nd nature. I didn’t even bat an eyelid – didn’t give it a 2nd concept. I noticed my drug sellers as my buddies.’
Since final summer time her existence has modified totally. Though she’s dwelling together with her oldsters, the luck of her TikTok channel and podcast has given her a way of objective. ‘They don’t make lots of cash,’ she admits. ‘I make maybe £200 from each podcast sponsorship, and TikTok pays me when my videos do well.’
Followers are drawn by means of her air of secrecy (her approachable, pleasant manner jogs my memory of a tender Davina McCall) and the bleak fascination of following an individual’s sobriety adventure in actual time. Every video begins with, ‘Hello, my name’s Hannah and I’ve been in restoration from medication and alcohol for X months…’ Then she is going on to reveal all. Since the beginning of her restoration she has documented her lowest moments in her previous existence, comparable to taking cocaine whilst on a travel together with her mum, in addition to the demanding situations of sobriety. There was once the buddy’s marriage ceremony when she struggled as the one teetotal particular person in a roomful of drinkers: ‘After a point I just didn’t really feel a part of it… I felt lonely lately,’ she informed her fans that night, nonetheless wearing her marriage ceremony outfit. Then there was once her first Cocaine Anonymous assembly, the place she was once greeted by means of a well-recognized face: ‘I had the same drug dealer for ten years,’ she tells me, ‘and the first day that I walked into Cocaine Anonymous, he was the greeter at the door.’
Distinctly missing within the evangelism that has transform a part of a lot sobriety content material – she’s in advance about the truth that infrequently the events had been amusing – Viney appeals to customers who aren’t reasonably in a position for a 12-step programme. It’s the non secular component, she says, that places off a few of her more youthful fans (most of the steps in AA require an individual to relinquish themselves to a better energy). She now hosts weekly Zoom conferences for someone inquisitive about speaking about their substance misuse however no longer willing to check out a standard programme. ‘There’s no power, so folks can go surfing and simply pay attention.
‘People will message me announcing, “I don’t want to go to AA, CA or NA because I don’t think I’ve got that big a problem”, so the Zooms are extra about discovering neighborhood, a at ease area for folks to take into accounts their dating with medication and alcohol.
‘People would much rather send me a long paragraph on TikTok messenger than talk to a friend or a loved one,’ she says. She thinks the phrase ‘addict’ is just too confronting – however many come to her figuring out they have got an issue. ‘Society has told us that an addict is a person on a park bench, drinking, with a needle hanging out of their arm. They think, “That’s no longer me, subsequently I’m no longer an addict.” But then they see considered one of my movies and it hits a nerve.’
Viney says her greatest be apologetic about is the toll her addictions took on her circle of relatives – one thing she is operating to fix. She grew up in a middle-class circle of relatives in Oxfordshire, the place her oldsters ran their very own trade. They had been supportive and loving. ‘I feel ashamed of how I treated them – I just wasn’t provide,’ Viney says. She would omit circle of relatives engagements and, when she did display up, acted as though it was once a burden to look them ‘because I was always high or dealing with a hangover’.
It was once tough to confess the level of her downside to her oldsters. ‘They’ve had questions, and I’ve attempted my best possible to reply to them, nevertheless it’s been tricky on them. No one needs to listen to that their kid become an addict,’ she says. Viney’s mum has despatched her a card each month since she began her restoration. ‘She writes things that she’s noticing about me, which might be coming again now that I’m sober.’ In the final one, she stated, “You have a sense of purpose. It is a pivotal time for you. Doors are opening. New opportunities are appearing.”’
Viney is now within the technique of writing a e-book. ‘I finally have a sense of peace,’ she says. ‘For the first time in ten years I’m no longer coping with a damaging voice in my head telling me I’ve f**ked up once more, I’ve misplaced regulate, I’ve let any individual down. I in spite of everything be at liberty.’
