Teen attempts suicide to escape her ice addiction
ON Christmas Eve it just got too much — the prospect of a lifetime gripped by an ice addiction overwhelmed her. Aged just 17, Michelle Talia Niki tried to take her own life, overdosing on pills at her Wagga Wagga home.
NSW
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ON Christmas Eve it just got too much — the prospect of a lifetime gripped by an ice addiction overwhelmed her.
Aged just 17, Michelle Talia Niki tried to take her own life, overdosing on pills at her Wagga Wagga home.
“I thought I’m going to be on ice for the rest of my life, I can’t change that,” Ms Niki said. “Then I realised the only way I’m going to stop is to kill myself. It’s constantly on my mind. Ice, ice, ice.”
READ: An entire generation wiped out by ice
She’s now three months clean but the desire remains. The euphoria of the needle hitting Ms Niki’s vein for the first time was so intense she chased it for years, craves it even now.
“I stood up and I just vomited everywhere because it was my first ever (injection) and it was just intense as, it was the best feeling I’d ever had in my life, and it still is,” she said.
She has even injected water in the past, just to feel the prick.
“When I tried quitting, I used to shoot up water instead.
“It sounds so stupid, trust me, but you fiend so much for a little prick in your arm.
“It feels like your body is crushing in against you when you’re craving it. It’s crazy, you can turn into someone that you’re not.”
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Talia remembers loving the emaciated version of herself.
“I was 56kg and I thought I had the world,” she said.
But soon cracked lips and scabby sores all over her face shattered the illusion.
The high only ended with incarceration when she pulled an armed robbery to pay back her dealer in mid-2017.
“I got a message from the guy I was supposed to give money to because I ticked up two points, which is only $100,” she said.
“I was with my mate and I said ‘hey, we can get more money plus give him money, we can get it all and have more, if we do the servo’.
“So that’s what we done.”
Talia’s message on rehab is brutal — “lock them up”.
She said the only time she properly got clean before her suicide attempt was when she was sent to juvenile detention for the armed robbery.
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