Addiction survivor Rachael Keogh has revealed how she lost 10 friends to drug abuse since Christmas.
The 39-year-old shocked the world in 2006 when she revealed gruesome images of her heroin ravaged arms.
The mum-of-one said: “Ten of my friends have passed away [of drug related-deaths] and one of them was really close.”
Rachael, who first started using aged 11, also revealed how her circulatory system began to fail because of drugs when she was 15.
The Dubliner said: “I hit rock bottom when I was 15 I think. My veins started to collapse in my body because of the repeated injections.
“I ended up injecting into capillaries which are small veins that can’t handle heroin and basically what happened was the citric acid burned through my skin.”
Rachael, who grew up in Ballymun in the north of the city, said taking ecstasy at 13 was a “quick downward spiral”.
She then started taking heroin to come down off ecstasy but found herself slipping even further into addiction.
She even worked the streets at the age of 13 to fund her habit after she was caught taking things from home to sell.
But Rachael found herself detaching from the horror she went through as a form of coping.
She told the Ryan Tubridy Show on RTE Radio yesterday: “When I became drug free, and I think it’s the same for a lot of people who are in recovery, you don’t connect to that kind of stuff right away.
“It takes time for you to be able to thaw out and to actually go, ‘Oh my god, that happened in my life.”
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It was only several years later when she was in recovery and watching a play which portrayed her life at 13 years old that the magnitude of her teenage years hit her.
Rachael said: “It first hit me when I sat in the audience and I’d seen the audience’s reaction, and they were horrified. Some of them were crying, some of them got up and walked out.”
She event spent more than 10 years in Mountjoy Prison which she described as “like being sent to a school to learn how to become a better criminal and a better addict”.
Rachael added: “I think for me it was probably the worst thing that could’ve ever happened to me was the fact that I was put in to prison when I was 15. I was only a child.
“I was put in with women who were up to 70 years of age. I was in a confined area where people were taking drugs with dirty needles, where I had been given drugs by older women, and you’re being pushed into the drug culture.”
