PROBLEMS AT HOME
For Isaac, his tussle with drug abuse was mostly a reflection of the problems at home – he had a strained relationship with his father since he was young.
“If he comes home, I’ll go to my room and hide,” he said, citing his father’s unpredictable temper and habit of controlling his every move.
His parents also quarrelled frequently, with remarks such as “If it’s not for you, we would have divorced long ago”. It left him feeling like he was the source of their unhappiness.
At the same time, Isaac was struggling with a break-up, as well as a loss of direction in life following the end of National Service and a sudden end to normalcy due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He recalled spending a “very lonely” birthday in June 2020. Alone in a hotel room, the countdown to his 22nd birthday only threw up “a lot of existential questions”.
He took drugs as a form of escape. With his own troubles at home, Isaac started seeing the stranger “as a father figure”, spending more time with him abusing drugs.
This free flow of drugs also led him to take ecstasy. Isaac grew increasingly tired and found it hard to function at work as a COVID-19 contact tracer. He lost weight and at his lightest, he weighed just 50kg.
In January 2021, he was sent to a drug rehabilitation centre.
Six months flew by and Isaac was eager to reset his life. He made plans with friends to start a food and beverage (F&B) business but just as things were falling into place, a meeting with an F&B business owner at the end of August sent him back to square one.
“The minute I reached his house and the door opened, all the drugs were there,” Isaac said.
Isaac recalled the night of Sep 1 when he was arrested for a second time. It had felt like “a perfect night” after dinner and a game of Mobile Legends with his mother, until he heard knocking on the front door.
When he answered the door, eight CNB officers rushed in. He was taken into his bedroom and asked repeatedly if he had anything to declare.
He said no, thinking that if he was confident enough, he would not be taken away. But the officers came prepared.
He told his mother that he had to leave with the CNB officers.
“Mum told me ‘Okay, I will wait for you to come back.’ Then the officers asked me, ‘I give you one last chance. Your urine clean or not clean? Don’t make your mum wait for nothing.’”
That was when he decided to come clean and admitted that he had taken drugs again.
“Mum kept asking ‘why’ … a thousand emotions charged into that one word but I didn’t know what to say,” Isaac recounted. His mother watched as the CNB officers put him in handcuffs and led him away in a police van.
Isaac was sent to the drug rehabilitation centre again. This time, he was there for nearly 10 months.