Resources: Review - A powerful account of a wasted life saved byintervention

Wasted By Mark Johnson Published by Sphere Price 12.99 ISBN 978-1847440242

Mark Johnson is a thirty-something entrepreneur, winner of the prestigious Prince's Trust Young Achiever of the Year Award, and author of this fascinating memoir, Wasted.

Johnson's childhood was dominated by both the violence of his father - "his left hand, the one with LOVE tattooed across it, holds me tight, too tight, round my throat" - and his mother's devotion to Jehovah. By the age of eight, Johnson had experienced the release offered by alcohol; by 11 he had lost his virginity and used heroin.

The first third of the memoir is a relentless chronicle of violence that triggers the real theme of the memoir: Johnson's excruciating yet inevitable decline into a squalid life of crime and drugs. Here, Johnson's writing becomes charged with urgency as he takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of drug experimentation, drug euphoria and drug paranoia. There are moments, most notably the birth of his son, when it looks like he may kick the habit once and for all. But, as he soon realises, "heroin has filled a hole in my soul" and failure seems inevitable. Two prison sentences later, Johnson dedicates his life to a cocktail of Special Brew, crack, heroin, speed and ecstasy.