My life looked perfect - but I was lost to the drug every middle-class woman vows she'll never touch. My husband had no idea until the day he discovered my $200,000 debt...
Alice Crawley had always been surrounded by chaos.
Growing up in Toronto, Canada, she was raised by high-achieving, high-functioning alcoholic parents in a house that she likens to a 'circus'.
'It was like living in a pressure cooker,' she tells me.
'I always felt like I was walking on eggshells and I never felt safe.
'My dad was a quiet drunk, whereas my mum would often be throwing plates and martini glasses at the walls.
'She would rage and any of us could be her target, whoever she felt like picking on that day. It was frightening.'
Despite her heavy drinking, Alice's mother was a successful academic specialising in medieval warfare; her father, who had grown up in foster homes, was a self-made man: a genius mathematician who went on to found his own reinsurance company.
'The message I received was: as long as you were performing, this kind of reckless behaviour was okay.'
Alice had her first alcoholic drink at seven, and got blackout drunk for the first time at age nine
Alice had her first drink at the age of seven when her parents allowed her a small glass of mulled wine at a Christmas party.
'I remember vividly taking a few sips and feeling this huge sense of relief,' she says.
'It was like a big warm hug. It was the first time I'd ever felt safe. I thought, "I'm going to be okay."'
After that, Alice began sneaking drinks from her parents' liquor cabinet. At age nine, she got blackout drunk for the first time after drinking a concoction of spirits she had found in the cupboard.
During high school, she gravitated towards a bad crowd, began smoking cannabis and tried LSD for the first time. She would hang around outside shops and ask older teenagers or young adults to buy alcohol for her.
'But at the same time I was school president, debate team champion, and starred in all the school plays, so my parents didn't care what I did after class,' she adds.
'My mum even thought it was funny. One morning after I'd come home clearly drunk the night before, she laughed and told me to eat some bacon and eggs. She said to me, "You'll be fine after that."'
Other issues were creeping in, too. Alice had begun to binge on junk food, then go for long runs to burn it all off. The relief she got from exercise was akin to the release she got from booze. Some days she would exercise for up to four hours.
Alice loved to experiment with LSD, mushrooms and ecstasy at parties, but her drug use soon spiralled out of control after being introduced to meth
Later, rather than bingeing on food, she would simply restrict her intake - but still felt compelled to run or use the Stairmaster for hours on end.
Alice went to university in Nova Scotia where she studied classical metaphysics, then eastern spirituality and Japanese. She leaned into the heavy drinking culture on campus where other high achievers like her worked hard and played harder.
She would get 'really drunk' five nights a week, drinking as many as 25 beers and sometimes experimenting with mushrooms, ecstasy and LSD.
'If I had an essay due, I might lay off the beers, but I'd still be smoking pot,' she adds.
After eventually seeing a psychiatrist about her food and exercise issues, she was diagnosed with anxiety, and prescribed tranquillisers.
'That was when it got really bad, because I'd mix the prescription medication with booze,' she tells me.
'And it wasn't so regulated then, so I'd doctor-shop so I always had heaps of meds on hand.'
At 23, keen to escape Canada and her dysfunctional family, Alice moved to Kyoto, Japan, where she worked as an English teacher and for the Japanese board of education.
'It was harder to get my prescription meds there but I started to meet members of the Yakuza [Japanese mafia] in bars, and they'd hook me up with cocaine,' she says.
'My drinking also escalated even further while I was in Japan.'
After an overdose of booze mixed with prescription drugs, Alice woke up in hospital to find her boss standing over.
'He told me he was worried about me and I needed to go back to Toronto to get help,' she says.
'He didn't exactly fire me, but I knew I had to go.'
Back in Toronto, the proximity to her family sent Alice's anxiety into overdrive and soon after arriving back, she had another overdose on prescription drugs and alcohol.
This time it was even more serious as she had an acute dystonic reaction, which caused involuntary contractions of her muscles and abnormal movements.
'I was a mess,' she says.
Believing the answers to her problems would be solved with another 'geographical' - addict speak for moving away from a particular location believing it's the reason for their issues - Alice moved to Sydney.
That would prove to be her downfall.
After a New Years' Eve party where she took cocaine and ecstasy, Alice quickly fell in with a party crowd. She also landed a well-paid job in financial services, which helped to fund - and normalise - her wild lifestyle.
Drinking and taking cocaine daily was pretty common in her industry so she fit right in and was able to hide the extent of her problem.
Then, at a Mardi Gras party a couple of months after she arrived in Sydney, she was offered methamphetamine - also known as ice - as a cheaper alternative to coke.
'Meth was the drug that really got me,' she says.
'I was instantly hooked.'
After moving to Sydney and trying ice for the first time at a Mardi Gras party, Alice was hooked
After that, Alice used meth around the clock to function.
'My day would start with a few lines. Then I'd head to the gym and run hard on the treadmill for 60 to 90 minutes,' she says.
She would later be told by a doctor that she was lucky she didn't have a heart attack while exercising at that intensity while on ice.
'Then I'd have a few more lines before work. Sometimes I'd top up at work, but I was nervous about taking it with me into the city.
'Luckily, in financial services there would often be a liquid lunch, where I could start drinking, and then if I needed to work late, I'd top up with more meth or I'd be offered cocaine.
'I'd then use benzos, like Valium, to help me get to sleep.'
Alice lived like this - day in, day out - for six months. At her worst, she was spending $5,000 a month on drugs just to function.
And by all accounts, she was functioning well. Her job involved a lot of public speaking, which she excelled at, and her involvement with the stock exchange meant she was responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars on a daily basis.
But not even her very generous paycheck could support her habit, and she eventually found herself in debt to the tune of $185,000.
'I was getting cash advances on credit cards to buy drugs,' she says.
'I was completely out of control.'
Alice met her now-husband Martin at the height of her addiction. One night, when they had been dating for six months, she told him she was going for a walk, but instead met her meth dealer down the road
'During this time, I met my now-husband Martin in a city bar,' she says.
'Believe it or not, he was an actuary. He literally worked in risk management, and here was me, in nearly $200,000 of debt because of meth.'
While Martin also enjoyed all the trappings of a corporate city job, he soon realised Alice was spiralling out of control.
One night, about six months after they began dating, Alice told Martin she was going for a walk. In reality, she was going to meet her meth dealer in his car down the road.
'I was picking up my usual three "eight balls" [three gram bags] for the week, but my dealer took one look at me and said, "I can't sell to you anymore,"' she says.
'I thought he was joking. But he said he couldn't in good conscience give it to me. I was covered in sores and I'd lost a huge amount of weight.
'You know you're having a bad day when you get cut off by your meth dealer.'
It should have been a glaring red flag. But it wasn't. Alice just found another dealer who would sell to her.
She carried on using for another month, but then Martin sat her down and gave her an ultimatum: 'I will stand by you and support you because I know you are so much more than this. But you need to get clean.'
It didn't take Alice long to agree. 'Martin was everything and I knew I'd be dead in six months without him,' she tells me.
She checked into rehab where she told the counsellor about all the reasons behind her drinking and drug abuse: alcoholic parents, a chaotic home, never feeling safe.
The counsellor wasn't buying it. 'You talk a good game,' he said.
'I'd been a professional, high-functioning addict for so long, I didn't think anyone could actually see through me,' Alice admits.
After 18 years sober, Alice relapsed on alcohol at her 50th birthday celebrations. She says it's important to be transparent about relapse because it's part of recovery
The counsellor wasn't one for navel-gazing and delivered Alice some tough love.
'He said, "Make no mistake, Alice. This elevator only goes in one direction and that's straight into the ground and six feet under, so you can get off whenever you want, it's your call.' That caught my attention.'
Alice threw herself into therapy and a 12-step program. After her first stint in rehab, she was finally ready to come clean to Martin about the $185,000 debt she had accumulated with her drug habit.
'He said to me, "I will support you emotionally, but I won't bail you out." I had to clean it up on my own. And I did,' she says.
Alice stopped running from debt collectors. She wrote letters negotiating with creditors, and worked to get a large pay increase in her financial services job. Eventually she paid it all off herself.
There were a couple of blips in her recovery. While she gave up meth straight off the bat, the booze and the benzos took a bit longer.
Alice got completely sober in 2004 and has now been in recovery for 20 years.
She wants to be completely transparent, though: 'I had a relapse in 2021. It was my 50th birthday and I thought I'd be fine to have a couple of champagnes.
'Thank God, I didn't go back to the hard stuff. But I drank for two years after that. During that time, I sustained an injury that meant I couldn't run, and without exercise as a coping mechanism, I began to restrict food again.
'I ended up in hospital, very unwell and severely underweight.'
Alice's focus now is telling her story and helping others
Alice has been sober for another year now and is doing well. She's taken a break from her corporate career to focus on recovery, sharing her story, and helping others. Much of her work is pro-bono, including talks she gives to patients in rehabs.
'I'm passionate about sharing my story and hoping it can save others,' she says.
That story is now a book, On the Way to Wonderland, which is also being made into a feature film with an 'incredible Aussie cast'.
Alice must remain tight-lipped about who is portraying her in the movie, but she's excited about the project and is assisting with the production to make sure her story is done justice.
She and Martin are happily married and 'the strongest they've ever been'.
'Things are actually better than they've ever been, especially after I picked myself up after that recent relapse,' she says.
'I'm the most balanced I've ever been.'
You can read more about Alice here.
