DAVINA McCall says it is a “miracle” she is still alive after abusing so much heroin, ecstasy and cocaine in her youth.
The telly presenter, 53, admitted she was “kissing goodbye” to her brain cells, taking five ecstasy pills in a night – while other caners would take just half of one.
In an interview with DJ Fat Tony on his show The Recovery, she said: “It’s a miracle I’m still alive.
“My drug of choice was heroin. I went from speed then to coke – coke was/is really expensive for a 17, 18-year-old girl still at school.
“Then I got a job at Models One and that changed everything. I was partying a lot and it was the ecstasy era and it was late Eighties, early Nineties – summer of love. Everybody hugging each other, and stroking each other, and telling everybody that they loved them. So I remember that as being a really crazy, fun time.”
But the broadcaster sought help over twenty years ago, when a friend said “everybody talks about you”, telling Davina she couldn’t be friends with her anymore – and she has been clean ever since.
She recalled: “That was like a dagger, I thought, ‘Oh my god, I am the topic of discussion at dinner parties.’
“Up until that point, I was like, ‘I’m not an addict. I can just give up one drug, heroin, and keep taking the others.’ But I took one line of coke and I was up for 24 hours.
“I couldn’t take half an E, I had to take five. Suddenly, everything started doing a Tetris and was falling into place, I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m an addict.’
“I turned up at this meeting, and I sort of slid into the back and everybody at the meeting turned around and I knew some of these people, because they were people I’d used with, or from where I’d been to a couple of meetings before and decided I didn’t need to be there because they were all scuzzy junkies and I wasn’t there yet.
“I sat at the back and thought, ‘Oh god, oh god.’ And then at the end the guy went, ‘We’ve got 10 minutes for newcomers or people who find it hard to share.’ I felt like everybody turned around and looked at me and I went, ‘My name is Davina, and I’m addict.’
“And then I started crying and I don’t think I stopped for two weeks, the surrender.”
But Davina cited that she abused drugs to “fill the hole” left from being abandoned by her late mum Florence Knock when she was a little girl.
She said: “I do not see myself as a victim in any way.
“It’s a fact that when I was nearly four, my mum took me to my granny’s house and said I’m going on holiday for two weeks and she never came back. I then ended up feeling like a guest at my granny’s, but it was all organised.
“We kind of know now that we need to process it. I felt abandoned. I was still going to visit my mum over the holidays but I didn’t know that [at the time].
“That might have been the core of the issue but I feel like there’s an overarching reason why I used, and that is that I constantly had a hole here and it really hurt.”
