“It was an all consuming fear that I would just stop breathing in my sleep, but still, all I wanted was to take more.”
“I approached my own son in the street asking for drugs, that’s how low I was, benzos just destroyed my life.”
These are the stories of two separate people with the same catastrophic addiction to a prescription drug.
Thirty years apart in age and 200 miles apart in distance, their stories are scarily similar.
I meet Rory Maslen (they/them), 21, at their university flat in Leeds. As Rory sank into the sofa, they look at me with a timid smile.
They’re about to talk me through haunted years. The ones filled with an undying desperation to guzzle more of the drug that was killing them.
Inside the four walls of Rory’s university room once lived anxiety, depression and what they thought was the remedy – benzos.
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“There were weeks at a time when the only reason I would leave my accommodation was to go and pick up a few boxes of pills.
“I was literally eating pills by the handful just to get through the day.”
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Across the border in Edinburgh, William Anderson, 53, sits in his temporary accommodation generously recounting his painful tale, as I hang on his every word.
“After my daughter died when I was 19, I turned to benzos to cope with the grief.
“I got them prescribed by the doctor – seven pills a day – but when that wasn’t enough I started getting them on the street too.”
Benzodiazepines are anti-anxiety prescription drugs that have flooded the illicit market.
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What are Benzos?
The drug is supposed to be prescribed, but thousands of vulnerable people across the UK are buying dangerous street benzos to self-medicate according to charities like Turning Point and UKAT.
And now testing services are raising the alarm after finding street benzos sold for as little as 10p are being cut with a synthetic opioid 10 times stronger than Fentanyl.
‘Stripped of any free will’
What began as self-medication for Rory turned into self destruction.
“Before I knew it, I was completely stripped of any free will, any major thought in my head all the time was focused on getting more benzos.”
Rory told me they were taking 30 benzo pills per day when they started experiencing life threatening seizures and side effects.
“Your muscles hurt, your bones hurt, you have constant tremors and if you go outside in the sun it feels like your eyes are burning. You’re hot and cold, more so than I’ve ever felt ever before.”
‘Approached my own son for drugs’
For Will, a lifetime of trauma, grief and isolation drove him to dive head first into what he calls “benzo oblivion”.
Taking 100 pills a day and selling benzos to fuel his addiction, Will was on the edge of death.
After a 20 year battle with benzos, Will tells me he tried to take his own life. The amount of benzos he took knocked him out for four days, but still he continued using.
“The lowest moment of my life was approaching a group of guys in the street and asking for drugs.
“When I looked up I realised it was my own son – the only son that was still in contact with me.
“The look of shame he had was the worst feeling in the world.
“The next morning I woke up and screamed in the mirror, you either live or you die.”
Will has been sober ever since that day.
He created his own support group called “Oor Willie”, which now has over 1,700 members, and he trained with the Scottish Drugs Forum qualifying as an addiction support worker in August.
It was Rory’s passion for music and their drive to get back to playing with their band Kiosk that gave them the courage to bear through and taper off the benzos with the support of their family.
When I asked Rory and Will what they would say to young people considering self-medicating with benzos now, their response was the same.
The man who served 14 years in jail for the murder of schoolboy Jimmy Mizen has been recalled to prison for breaching his licence conditions.
It follows reporting in The Sun newspaper that Jake Fahri, 35, was a drill rapper releasing music under the name TEN, who conceals his identity with a balaclava, and was played on BBC 1Xtra.
A Probation Service spokesperson said: “Our thoughts are with Jimmy Mizen’s family who deserve better than to see their son’s murderer shamelessly boasting about his violent crime.”
Jimmy’s father Barry told Sky News: “We’re not gloating or anything, in a way it’s quite sad.”
His son bled to death after Fahri threw an oven dish at him in a south London bakery on 10 May 2008.
The dish shattered on his chin and severed an artery in the schoolboy’s neck.
Fahri was 19 when he was given a life sentence in 2009 with a minimum term of 14 years and was released on licence in June 2023.
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His music was played on BBC 1Xtra less than 18 months later, the Sun reported, adding that DJ Theo Johnson named him an “up-and-coming star”.
Jimmy’s father earlier said he and his wife Margaret were “stunned into silence” when they were told about Fahri’s music, which often features violent themes.
In one song, which appears to reference Jimmy’s death, he raps about “sharpening” a blade.
“Judge took a look at me, before the trial even started he already knows he’s gonna throw the book at me,” the lyrics say.
Another track includes the lines: “See a man’s soul fly from his eyes and his breath gone… I wanted more, it made it less wrong. Seeing blood spilled same floor he was left on.”
The BBC has said the artist’s tracks do not feature on any BBC playlists, and that a track which appeared to reference Jimmy’s death had never been played on its channels.
A spokesman for the broadcaster added there were “no further plans to play his music”, adding: “We were not aware of his background and we in no way condone his actions.”
A Probation Service spokesperson said: “All offenders released on licence are subject to strict conditions. As this case shows, we will recall them to prison if they break the rules.”
Jimmy’s parents founded the Mizen Foundation after their son’s death. The charity helps young people in London who are escaping violence.
Mr Mizen said: “It appears that if he’s been recalled to prison, he must’ve breached his licence conditions
The man suspected of abducting Madeleine McCann won’t face any charges in the foreseeable future, a prosecutor has told Sky News.
German drifter Christian B, who cannot be fully identified under his country’s privacy law, is expected to be freed from an unrelated jail sentence this year while police in three countries continue to search for evidence against him.
Prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters said: “There is currently no prospect of an indictment in the Maddie case.
“As things stand, the accused Christian B’s imprisonment will end in early September.”
Madeleine, aged three, was asleep with her younger twin siblings in the family’s Portuguese rented holiday apartment before mother Kate discovered her missing at around 10pm on 3 May, 2007.
Her parents were dining nearby on the complex with friends and taking turns to check on all their sleeping children every half an hour.
Madeleine’s disappearance has become the world’s most mysterious missing child case.
Philipp Marquort, one of Christian B’s defence lawyers, welcomed the prosecutor’s pessimism about bringing charges.
He said: “This confirms the suspicions that we have repeatedly expressed, namely that there is no reliable evidence against our client.
“We regret that we have not yet been granted access to the investigation files. We have not yet been able to effectively counter the public prejudice arising from statements made by the prosecutor’s office.”
Christian B, 47, is in jail and coming to the end of his sentence for the rape of an elderly American woman in Praia da Luz, the Portuguese resort where Madeleine disappeared.
In October, he was acquitted on a series of rape and indecent assault charges after a non-jury trial in Germany, in which several references were made to his status as the main suspect in the Madeleine case.
The prosecutor said he was awaiting the court’s written judgment before launching an appeal against the acquittal. He believes the trial judges were biased against the prosecution.
If successful, he could apply for a new arrest warrant for Christian B to keep him in custody until a retrial with new judges.
He said: “We hope that the Federal Court of Justice will decide before the end of the accused’s imprisonment. If the Federal Court follows our legal opinion, we could apply for a new arrest warrant for the accused’s offences, so that the accused would then remain in custody beyond September 2025.
Mr Marquort said the defence team would oppose the prosecution’s appeal against the acquittal.
Prosecutor Mr Wolters has said in the past that he believes Madeleine is dead and that Christian B was responsible for her death. The suspect denies any involvement.
The case against Christian B is purely circumstantial; he’s alleged to have confessed to a friend that he abducted Madeleine, he has convictions for sex crimes against children, he was living in the area at the time, his mobile phone was close by when the young girl vanished and he re-registered one of his vehicles the next day.
The prosecutor won’t say what evidence he has to convince him Madeleine is dead, but he admitted he is still trying to find forensic evidence to link Christian B to the girl.
Jim Gamble, former head of the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre, said he had expected the prosecutor to charge Christian B soon.
“He’s implied the whole way through that he has something more than the public are aware of,” he said.
“He’s made fairly definitive statements about whether Madeleine is alive or dead so you would expect their strategy to have been to charge him sooner rather than later.
“From what he’s said today I wonder if we’re witnessing the re-positioning of something to manage the disappointment that’ll come.”
Mr Wolters, who is based in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, is investigating the case with the help of Portuguese police and detectives from Scotland Yard.
An investigation, led by the Surrey and Sussex Police Major Crime Team, is under way and inquiries remain ongoing, police said.
Senior Investigating Officer DCI Kimball Edey said specialist officers “are working around the clock to gather as much information as possible,” and that the force’s “thoughts are with the family and friends of the victims at this unbelievably difficult time”.