Making Recovery Visible

At seventeen, Dominic Wills walked into an adult drug and alcohol service and realised he was the youngest person in the room by twenty years. He'd been using since he was thirteen. He'd had a drug and alcohol worker assigned by the local authority at fourteen. He'd cycled through children's mental health services, substance misuse support, and every referral the system could offer. None of it had worked. And now, sitting in a waiting room full of people who looked nothing like him, he understood why.

He had never once seen a young person in recovery.

Dominic is now several years clean, DJing, running club nights, and doing something that takes real courage: talking about his addiction publicly while building a career. His story challenges almost everything we think we know about who addiction affects and why so many young people never find their way to recovery.

Seeking, Not Sliding

The story we tell ourselves about young people and drugs usually starts with peer pressure. A vulnerable kid falls in with the wrong crowd. Gets offered something at a party. Spirals from there.

Dominic's experience was different. He went looking for it. He knew what drugs were from popular culture, from TV and films. He was curious, probably pushing back against his social group, wanting to appear a certain way. And once he found what he was looking for, something switched on. His words, not mine.

By fifteen, he was buying drugs through social media. By the time he left sixth form, he'd used cannabis, ecstasy, MDMA, speed, Xanax, cocaine, and whatever else he could get hold of.

There was no single traumatic event. No chaotic household. That profile doesn't fit our comfortable categories. And so the system didn't know what to do with him.

The Good Student Problem

He attended classes under the influence of one substance or another for years. But he turned in good results, answered questions, and so nobody looked closer. As he told me: "You get overlooked when you're good at school, when you put your hand up, when you answer questions, when you turn in good results. You do to a certain extent kind of fall under the radar."

His older sister had been through the same school. The family was known, perceived as a good family. So it couldn't be that serious. There were close calls, conversations that could have gone another way. But they didn't.

At home, the reality was entirely different. The lying, the disappearing, the constant strings of deception needed to fund a habit that cost far more than any teenager could earn. His mother filed missing persons reports. She went to bed not knowing where her son was and waited for a text in the morning to confirm he was alive, that he hadn't overdosed, that he hadn't been found somewhere. That happened more than once. That was the texture of daily life for his family while, at school, everything appeared to be fine.

A system that measures young people through compliance and academic performance will always miss the one who can do both while in crisis. Yet we’ve built a system that equates compliance with coping. And then we wonder why the ones who can do both slip through the cracks.

Falling Through the Middle

Dominic accessed every service you'd expect. Drug and alcohol workers from fourteen. Referrals to every relevant agency the system had. He was assessed and offered help repeatedly across four years. He could get through the door. The problem was that nothing behind it was designed for someone like him.

He wasn't being excluded from school. He hadn't acquired a criminal record. He wasn't injecting. And so the response he got, from multiple professionals across multiple years, amounted to: why are you here? You don't really qualify.

His parents fared no better. They were told he was going through a phase. That he'd fallen in with the wrong crowd. That they weren't being stern enough. One parent he knows was told by a GP, bluntly, that young people take drugs now instead of drinking, and to stop wasting the GP's time.

Government data shows 14,352 children and young people were in drug and alcohol treatment between April 2023 and March 2024, a 16% increase on the previous year. Eighty per cent reported starting substance use before the age of 15. But the services designed to catch them are still built around a stereotype: the chaotic user, the excluded kid, the one with a record. If you don't match that picture, you slip through the cracks.

No Evidence It Was Possible

That moment at seventeen, surrounded by people decades older, shaped everything that followed.

Dominic never saw a young person get clean and go on to do the things he wanted to do. He never saw someone his age in recovery who'd gone to university, held down a job, been on holiday with friends. He had no evidence that a life without drugs was even possible for someone like him. As far as he was concerned, most people took drugs. If you didn't, you were the odd one out.

Research published in The Lancet Psychiatry in 2025 backs up what he experienced. Drawing on 1.5 million treatment records from NHS services, it found that young adults aged 16 to 24 were around 25% less likely to meet the threshold for reliable recovery compared with those aged 25 to 65. The researchers estimated that if outcomes for younger adults matched those of older adults, an additional 5,000 young people would recover each year. Five thousand people a year. Not because treatment doesn't exist, but because it wasn't built for them.

The Alcohol Blind Spot

Dominic studied drugs in society as part of his degree, and his analysis of our collective blind spot around alcohol deserves attention. He doesn't separate drugs and alcohol. He sees them as the same thing. So many of us don't.

In 2023/24, 39% of all violent crimes in England and Wales occurred where the victim believed the offender was under the influence of alcohol: roughly 440,000 incidents in a single year. On any given Friday night in any city centre, the majority of people getting arrested, fighting, and ending up in hospital will have been drinking. Yet we treat alcohol as a social norm and drugs as a moral failing.

Dominic made a point that challenged my own preconceptions. The physical effects of sustained alcohol addiction, he said, are among the worst of any substance. He regularly sees people who were addicted to heroin for years get into recovery and physically rebuild. With alcohol, if the addiction has been sustained, that recovery often doesn't come. The damage is permanent.

I caught myself in that moment. I was applying my own generational bias: treating alcohol as not great but not that bad, while instinctively viewing drugs as something categorically worse. I've got three adult children who tell me drugs are readily available. I believe them. But my conditioning runs deep. The Misuse of Drugs Act was passed in 1971, the same year Nixon declared his war on drugs, and it still governs how we classify substances in this country. Fifty-four years of policy built on a distinction the evidence no longer supports. That line shapes how GPs respond to worried parents. And it shapes whether a young person feels able to ask for help or expects to be judged the moment they do.

That judgment doesn't just come from social attitudes. It's written into law.

What Criminalisation Actually Costs

Dominic is careful with his position on drug policy. He's not an advocate for drug use. He recognises that many people use substances recreationally without developing a problem.

But consider what the current framework looks like from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old who knows they're in trouble. You've got a habit you can't control. You know it's illegal. You've been told that using drugs makes you a criminal. Your parents might face judgment for your behaviour. Your school has a strict policy that could end in exclusion. Every voice of authority in your life has given you the same message: this is wrong, and you are wrong for doing it. In that environment, how likely are you to put your hand up and say you need help?

That's what criminalisation costs. Not in arrest figures or court time, but in silence. In years of a young person's life spent hiding something that could have been addressed if the conversation hadn't been closed off before it began. Dominic spent years in that silence, and he's far from alone. Many police forces are already deprioritising personal possession offences, particularly for cannabis, and there's growing recognition that criminalising users doesn't reduce use. It just pushes the problem further from view.

The Results Of Recovery

I asked Dominic why he talks publicly about his addiction, given the stigma and the professional risk that carries for someone at the start of his working life.

His answer was simple: because he never saw anyone else do it.

He's made it his business to prove that recovery doesn't mean retreating from life. He goes to clubs. He's been to university. He sits in the pub with his friends, because that's what his friends do, and he's done the work to be comfortable there.

As he told me: "I got into recovery to actually enjoy my life and to go out and really make a good go at reliving my life and doing the things that I wanted to do. Recovery unlocks so many boundaries for you. The main boundary is that you're kept in addiction. And recovery should be a tool that allows you to go and do whatever you want to do."

And until we make that visible, particularly for young people, we're asking them to walk a path they can't see.

The ONS Crime Survey estimates that nearly 900,000 people aged 16 to 24 used an illegal drug in the year ending March 2025, everything from a single use of cannabis to regular dependency. That's roughly one in six, down from a peak of nearly one in three in the late 1990s. The headline number has fallen, but for those who develop a problem, the route to recovery remains poorly lit, especially if their life doesn't look chaotic from the outside.

Dominic Wills is changing that. He's making recovery visible for young people in a way that services, policy, and the media have consistently failed to do. He shouldn't have to carry that alone. There should be peer-led recovery models built for young people, age-appropriate services, visible role models supported by the system rather than succeeding in spite of it.

If you're worried about someone, or about yourself, Dominic's advice is the right place to start: talk about it. You don't have to wait until everything falls apart. The conversation is the seed of everything that follows. And if you work in education, health, or children's services: the young person in front of you who's answering questions and turning in good results might be the one who needs your attention most. Performance is the mask that addiction wears best.

Until next time, 

Alison