After seeing what they did for my mate, I joined the advisory committee at the Glen at have been closely involved ever since. He is coming up to six years clean and now works as a counsellor helping others do the same. Ed made it to The Glen, a rehabilitation centre on the central coast that specialises in indigenous addiction. When he turned up at the Forager offices 10 years later, he was addicted to alcohol and ice and still borrowing to gamble money he didn’t have. His partner left him and he lost his job. By 25 he was gambling every cent he earned. Maybe the seeds were sown in those school poker games, but Ed’s gambling became a poker-machine addiction in his early twenties. He came to Sydney a year after me and ended up with a good job with CityRail. We played footy together from eight years old and spent thousands of hours playing cards on our long bus trips to all corners of the state. Ed was a year below at Wellington High School (with only a little exaggeration, he claims he was the smartest kid in his year). Our lives followed similar paths until our early 20s. With tears streaming down his face Ed* said to me “mate, I need help”. Six years ago a school mate of mine rocked up to Forager’s King St offices in Sydney.
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