Prescription drug addition that turned Jehovah Witness thrillseeker into a ‘train surfing monster’

A thrill seeker who hung from the back of two fast-moving trains while yelling ‘I’m train surfing motherfucker’ says being in jail was the best thing that happened to him because he cured his addiction to prescription drugs. .

Damien Hyland, 24, was arrested in September 2021 after he filmed the stunt and posted it online, saying on TV news at the time that he did it because “there’s nothing to do in Perth”.

However the youtuber He has since revealed to Daily Mail Australia that the real reason behind the move was because he was high on a cocktail of benzodiazepines, Xanax, Valium and alcohol.

The drugs are highly addictive and are often prescribed by doctors to relieve anxiety or severe insomnia. Hyland was given a benzodiazepine script in 2019 because she couldn’t sleep.

By the time he decided to coach surfing two years later, he had already woken up in the hospital multiple times after drug overdoses, his friends were terrified for his life and disowned him, and his family was in a constant state of worry.

His body had developed a tolerance to the medication, which meant he had to take about 20 pills and wash them down with vodka to get the same high he felt when he started taking drugs.

At one point, he mixed so many pills with vodka that he woke up in the hospital four days later; she had been in a coma on life support, with her father and her sister at her bedside.

But it wasn’t enough to get him off drugs forever. Just hours after speaking to TV cameras about the train surfing incident, Hyland went out and took more pills, was arrested for disorderly conduct, and woke up in a police guard house.

His Legal Aid lawyers did not apply for bail on his behalf, so the magistrate decided to keep him in custody for 17 days, which he says was the best thing that happened to him in his life.

Hyland, who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness believing he would be killed if he fraternized with the outside world, described jail as “the scariest place on Earth” and called the experience “a huge eye opener.”

“I had two and a half weeks where I was sober and I just talked to some of the guys and they said, ‘What are you doing? I’m here for 20 more years and you’re here. For two more weeks? Stick your head in.’

An inmate told Mr. Hyland that he would “beat the crap” out of him if he ever went back to prison.

He said he has no regrets about his addiction problems because “I changed as a person.”

“I realized that addiction only ends in two ways: prison or death.”

Hyland was prescribed benzodiazepines in 2019 to treat insomnia, which he believes was the result of stress after a close friend died due to depression.

“I realized that the more I drank, the higher I felt and it was the first time in my life that I felt high,” he said.

“Then I realized that if I mixed these pills with alcohol I felt even better, so I started taking five, six or seven at night and then mixed them with alcohol, straight vodka or beer.”

Mr. Hyland went back to the same doctor several times for more scripts, saying he had run out of or misplaced them, before realizing he could go to multiple doctors and get multiple prescriptions.

She eventually took so many pills that she was high every night, but her life really started to fall apart when a friend offered her Xanax.

“I ran into town, got money out of the bank and grabbed the Xanax,” he said.

“I didn’t even go home, I got back on the train, I had these Xanax and then I was in the hospital not knowing what had happened.”

When he was released from the hospital the next day, he went straight home to get another package before going to work. After work, he took more pills and woke up in the police guardhouse.

At his lowest point he was taking 10 Xanax a day, until he woke up in the hospital again to be told ‘whatever you took last night contained fentanyl’.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid prescribed to treat severe pain. It is 100 times more potent than morphine and is sometimes mixed with heroin and other recreational drugs, and is a common cause of overdose death in Canada and the United States.

At that moment, Hyland realized that she had an addiction.

“I had a couple of quiet days, then I woke up one day and for some reason I was like ‘nope, that’s how it was.’ I totally smashed a vodka bottle. I went to a park and sat there and cried and didn’t.” . I don’t even know why,” she said.

Then he got a call from his aunt to say she was coming to visit him, so he went home, drank half a bottle of vodka, and took all the pills he had: a mix of Valium, benzodiazepine, and Xanax.

“I woke up four days later to my little sister standing next to me and my dad next to me and I was out of a coma and on life support for four days,” she said.

“Now that’s where I wish I could sit here and tell you, this needs to stop, I need to stop taking drugs, but that’s not what happened.”

It took Hyland a couple of days to recover before she was back on the pills.

He decided that he wanted “everyone” to know that he was an alcoholic and a drug user, and came up with the idea of ​​riding in the back of a train and posting the images on social media.

His friends were upset that he would risk his life like that, but he didn’t care. “He loved it, I loved the risk, I loved the fact that I ended up in the news, I loved the fact that it upset people,” he said.

‘I thought, ‘relax, let’s take more pills, let’s drink more’.”

Soon after, he was placed in the police watch house.

Mr. Hyland has now been sober for about a year and a half and vowed never to touch drugs again.

“In jail I thought ‘all you have to do is get off the pills and then you don’t have to worry about being dead or in prison’, and I said ‘gee, maybe I just need to clean myself up’.” “,’ he remembered.

“If I drink, I have to be with someone, I don’t drink alone, and I have complied with those rules and I couldn’t be more grateful to the judge.”