Alice Crawley 'Connect with someone YOU TRUST'

SHE’S BATTLED ABUSE, ADDICTION AND DEBT NOW SHE’S FINALLY FREE

- Jodie Wolf

she was 9 years old when she was first introduced to marijuana by a family friend. By the time Canadian-born Alice Crawley was 11, “I was a blackout drinker,” the author tells WHO. “At 15, I was waking up in the centre of a park, in the middle of winter. It got really bad through my teens.”

Now 51, Sydney-based Alice has clawed her way out of her addictions to alcohol, marijuana and prescription medications, as well as debt, and is on a mission to help others beat the same issues – and the financial implications that can come with dysfunction. Her self-published book, On The Way To Wonderland (alicecrawley.com), chronicles how she got well – eventually.

For Alice, things got a lot worse before they improved though. When she got to university, she was smoking “a fair bit of pot” and had “started hitting the prescription tranquillizers and sleeping pills pretty hard”. She says, “I was also prescribed Ativan for anxiety and I remember thinking, ‘These are amazing.’” In her early 20s, Alice went to work in Japan to help teachers with their English. Despite it being an amazing opportunity, Alice says that she was “all over the place because I was on so many pills and drinking so much”. At 24, she overdosed in Kyoto and ended up in a psychiatric ward. “I was anaesthetising my anxiety. I wanted out,” she explains. She was sent back to Toronto.