Thomas Delaney never used to believe he was “good enough to be loved”. Growing up, he internalised the hurt he saw playing out at home. “I thought I was useless, I wasn’t a nice person … I even thought that my mum and dad didn’t love each other because of me.”

When I visit him (and his extremely affectionate black-and-white cat, Figaro) at home in Glasgow, Delaney, dressed in a jumper printed with the words “nicotine is dumb”, is frank about the impact his childhood had on him. “I had suicidal ideations from a very, very young age because I assumed that, if I was dead, maybe my mum and dad wouldn’t be arguing.” Later, he became addicted to ketamine. At his most unwell, he weighed just 38kg (6st).

“The reason people use drugs of any kind is because they want to escape,” Delaney says. The 39-year-old has been abstinent from drugs for the past seven years and now works as a public speaker to raise awareness of and prevent substance abuse.

Delaney’s parents are Irish and he lived in Nenagh, County Tipperary, for the first two years of his life before the family moved to Hackney, east London. His parents’ relationship was on and off throughout his childhood, but it finished for good on 31 August 1997 – he remembers clearly because it was the day that Diana, Princess of Wales died – when his mother moved with Delaney, then 11, and his two younger brothers to Barnsley. But tensions at the new home remained high. As a teenager, Delaney took any way out he could find: joining the army cadets and signing up to every weekend away; staying at friends’ houses as much as possible; taking on a job at a call centre when he was 16; and eventually attempting to drown out everything with drugs.

He was 17 when he first tried cocaine on a night out, “behind a Greggs in Barnsley town centre”, he says, with a grim smile. He immediately “fell in love with” the feeling of being high, becoming hooked on the way it made him feel connected to others – something his life had been lacking.

One day, he went to work – he had a job in sales at a water filtration company – after a weekend of partying and collapsed. “I had white powder all around my nose,” he says. His boss fired him on the spot. After that, he and a friend moved back to Ireland for a fresh start. For a short while, that seemed to work. “I started looking after myself, rarely took drugs,” he says.

After six months, he returned to England and decided to try living in London. He got another sales job. Although he still took cocaine “if I went out on a date or I went out on a night out … life was a lot more manageable”. However, his job was demanding, living costs continued to rise and, after two years, he had “just had enough”. At 21, lonely and lacking direction, he returned to Barnsley, where the drug scene had “sort of shifted”: ketamine, a dissociative anaesthetic, had become the drug of choice for several of his friends. Recent data has shown a concerning rise in the class B drug’s recreational use in England and Wales, with Barnsley named as a hotspot by Alison Downey, a consultant urologist in South Yorkshire.

When he had been in London, he had “despised ketamine”, Delaney says. His reason for taking drugs then was to socialise; he couldn’t see the point of taking something that made you seem like “a zombie”. But after moving in with two friends in Barnsley, one of whom dealt drugs, Delaney started experimenting on nights out. “I would use cocaine to pick me up, I would use ketamine to take me down,” he says.

It makes sense to Delaney that ketamine has risen in popularity: not only is it cheap, but it also appeals to partygoers and people sitting at home on their sofa, wanting to lose themselves for a while. When he talks to young ketamine users now, “most of them really struggled through lockdown”, he says. While he doesn’t think rising ketamine use is a direct result of the pandemic, “it certainly hasn’t helped”: faced with the stress of a global catastrophe and a ban on leaving the house, using ketamine was often an escape.

But it’s an escape that comes at a price, as Delaney well knows. Back in Barnsley, he lost another job after he went to work high and swore at a customer. He started dealing drugs. While he realises now that it was “stupid”, he thinks having a phone that was constantly ringing gave him the sense of validation that he had always lacked.

But with constant access to ketamine and no work, Delaney’s addiction grew worse. He was “in and out of hospital” and chronic ketamine use had damaged his bladder to the extent that he was “peeing the lining out, peeing blood constantly”, he says. One day, he was in the bath when a man came to the door with a gun, looking for Delaney’s housemate, and proceeded to take all of the drugs and money in the property. “That was a really traumatising thing for me,” he says.

After that, he decided to take some time out from Barnsley, spending another 18 months in Ireland, living relatively healthily, before returning at 24. Despite his intention to stay off drugs, “as soon as I came off the boat, I used ketamine”, he says. He was offered his first “proper corporate job”, working in the education sector – an opportunity that nearly fell through due to his criminal convictions for drug possession. His manager decided to give him the job, with the caveat that he would be subject to random drug tests. “But I realised the drug test they used didn’t test for ketamine, it tested for everything else,” Delaney says. “So instantly my brain was like: well, you have to just use ket and you’ll be fine.”

He worked for that company for seven years before being made redundant in 2018. “I had nothing,” Delaney says. “I didn’t have a job to hide behind. I didn’t have any fancy suits to wear any more.” No longer able to afford a place of his own, he lived in his car “until I sold it for a drug debt”, he says. He started living in a field. After several suicide attempts, he decided to seek medical help and went to his local surgery. “I’m a drug addict,” he told the doctor. “And that was the first time I’d ever really said that.”

But it was an argument with his mother that really motivated him to turn his life around. By then, “my relationship with my mum wasn’t great”, he says. Delaney’s addiction had become so severe that he would have to urinate in a bucket when he visited her because he wasn’t able to make it to the bathroom.

“I knew that if I was ever going to get better, I couldn’t run away to Ireland or to London again and just hide it all,” he says. Through a local recovery service he had contacted after his visit to the doctor, he was admitted to a rehabilitation centre in Glasgow on 2 November 2018, at 32. He chose to go to a centre in Glasgow rather than other cities he was offered as, despite the city’s reputation, he reasoned it would be harder for him to get hold of drugs there without any local contacts. “But the real and the main reason was because it had en suite rooms,” he says. Delaney’s bladder issues were constant, so he wanted access to his own toilet.

The centre didn’t usually treat ketamine addiction. “Even some staff members would tell me that I wasn’t a proper junkie,” he says, as he wasn’t addicted to a class A drug. His six and a half months there “were one of the hardest parts of my life”, he says, noting that rehabilitation centres are not always the safe havens they are assumed to be. (“I never saw heroin in my entire life until I went to rehab.”)

Ultimately, he received support from staff whom he describes as “amazing”. It was during this period that he stopped using drugs for good.

After rehab, Delaney had no idea what he would do next. When an article he wrote for his rehabilitation centre went viral, he was contacted by the digital publisher LADbible, which wanted to make a video about him. Since then, he has been featured in various publications and has been invited to speak in parliament. While volunteering for a youth organisation in 2021, he met the late queen (although he says he is “not a royalist, obviously”). He now works with organisations including the police, the NHS and the National Crime Agency, sharing his story and working with drug users. “I want to normalise that people can get better,” he says.

He plans to continue that mission via more community work, as well as academic research: he graduated with a first class degree in community education from the University of Glasgow last year and is now studying for a master’s. He also became a father three years ago and says that building a life with his partner and son has become the “most important thing” to him. Kirsty, who runs her own cleaning business, “judges me on who she met, not my past”, he says.

Although Delaney hasn’t drunk alcohol or taken an illegal drug since his first day at rehab, he is keen to emphasise that he is “not special”. “Anybody can get better if they want to change their life and they have the strength and courage to do so. “I once walked 20 miles to attend a meeting and walked back because I had no money for the bus or a taxi,” he says. “We have this perception of: you go to rehab, someone waves a magic wand and then you leave and you never use drugs and alcohol again. I wish that was the case.” In the seven years since Delaney left rehab, “I could probably name 20, 30 people who have gone through that same service that are dead”.

Delaney says people need to be brought out of poverty if drug abuse is to be reduced, drawing on the idea that people living in economically deprived areas are more likely to have mental health issues or suffer in ways that might lead them to addiction. “We need rehabs. We need support workers. We need all of that,” Delaney says. “But unless the environment is changing, what’s the point?”

More than seven years after leaving rehab, has Delaney finally accepted what he couldn’t as a child: that he is deserving of love? “No,” he admits, welling up slightly. “You need to leave now,” he jokes. But, he says, being a father “gives me purpose”. “If there’s one thing I can teach my son, hopefully it’s that no matter how much you think you’ve fucked everything up, no matter how much you think everything’s shit, you can always change it.”

In the UK, Taking Action on Addiction provides links to support services. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186