MY SECRET ADDICTION NEARLY KILLED ME

Deborah Noble, 44, was leading a double life until everything began to unravel

- RACHEL TOMPKINS

Dressed in a smart suit jacket and skirt, I sat behind my desk at the bathroom sales office where I had worked for the past six months. As a customer walked through the door, I stood up with a smile plastered on my face and talked them through their bathroom design options. I was, to them and my colleagues, an image of professionalism.

But as soon as the customer had left, I headed towards the door myself. ‘Just popping out for a fag break,’ I told my colleagues. I unlocked my car door and climbed inside, carefully checking around the car park to make sure that nobody could see me.

SECRET WORLD

Sat in the driver’s seat, I reached into my handbag and pulled out a cannabis joint I had rolled before work. I lifted it to my lips and took a toke. Minutes later, I sprayed myself with perfume and went back into the office.

It was 2007 and by now, after more than a decade of smoking cannabis, my body was so used to the drugs that I didn’t look or even feel high. And my colleagues weren’t the only ones I was deceiving with my double life. My mum and family friends had no idea either, and I even believed my own lies.

Getting into drugs had happened by accident. I was brought up in a good family, with Dad working in banking and Mum for the local paper. But when my parents split up and I became a victim of bullying at school, my confidence began to dwindle.

I was 17 when I was offered my first cannabis joint at a party and, desperate to fit in, I took it. After that first toke, I felt a heady mix of being relaxed but also slightly nauseous.