Three friends from Belfast battling addiction

“It was hell on earth, I didn’t expect him to live that long. I always expected us to knock on the door and say he was found dead somewhere.”

For the past decade, Pat, like many other families, has been dealing with the consequences of their son’s drug addiction.

For the past six months, I’ve been exploring Northern Ireland’s drug culture, following addicts and their families.

As services in Northern Ireland struggle to keep up with demand, many people like Pat’s son Pete, 23, often struggle with addiction on their own.

Pete’s successful amateur boxing career is often halted by his cocaine habit.

At worst, he could spend hundreds of pounds on the substance in a single night.

He has tried numerous times to try to break his destructive relationship with drugs.

When I meet him, he’s been off cocaine for two weeks and says he’s determined to keep it that way.

“I’ll always have that thought in the back of my head, that worry that I’m going to relapse,” Pete tells a new two-part BBC series.

Boxing has been his lifeline, and recent drug relapses have coincided with times when he can’t train.

“It’s much deeper than just training and boxing. It’s a pride thing, an ego thing. I just hope nothing happens to me that means I can’t train,” he says.

He lives with his sister in County Down.

Pete’s mother left a year ago due to her drug use and the subsequent impact her behavior had on the family home.

“Drugs don’t get to the person they’re on, they get to the whole family,” says Pete’s mother.

Pete’s 18-year-old sister says her brother is her “best friend” but lives in constant fear of his relapse.

“There was a moment when we thought: ‘This is it.’ He is calm now. But we’re worried about him going right back to it, and I think part of him is. And that’s what we don’t want because it’s horrible to live like this,” he says.

Pete says that “all his friends” have struggled with drug use.

Two miles down the road, his good friend Caolan, has just returned home after leaving Ballynahinch and getting cleaned up.

Since his teenage years, his cocaine use had taken over his life, and he left the city and moved to London to try to beat it.

“Whenever we started doing coke, we stayed up all night for a whole week. It just takes a hold of you,” he says.

Caolan, 23, who works in construction, struggles to avoid drugs in a town he says is awash with them.

“You go down there, and everybody’s there. It’s chaos,” he says. “I want to get out of this small town because of this problem.”

Caolan’s best mate, Sam, who works as a contractor, is in the grip of addiction.

“It’s always there. I used to play football, I had interests, hobbies, now it’s go to work, drink, take coke, repeat.

“Even looking back, it’s like how many things you dropped to pick up that one thing,” says Sam.

Looking ahead, Sam is hopeful that he can overcome his current addiction to cocaine.

“People say there are (sic) two results, there are three. It’s prison, death or the future. I’m hoping for the third, but the first two are much more likely if I keep going.”

Caolan, Sam and Pete are all friends, who know all too well the dangers of heavy drug use, each having lost close friends or family to drug overdoses.

Sam says, “There are probably 10 people who have died of drug-related deaths probably within 500 meters of my house.”

Friends Caolan, Sam and Pete rely on each other for support, as Sam says, “there are times when there’s no one else to call, and you call their number and everything’s fine an hour later” .

In today’s click and collect drug culture, addiction is a daily battle and it is the support of friends and family that gives hope for the future for many.