From Wan Chai meth head to bestselling author and radio producer: Chris Thrall on his return from the abyss
Thrall tells the Post how he beat addiction to write Eating Smoke, his memoir of life as a homeless drug addict working in a triad bar, which has been adapted for radio by RTHK Radio 3
Chris Thrall has been a lot of things: Royal Marine commando, daredevil, charity fundraiser, author, a doorman at a triad-owned nightclub in Wan Chai and a methamphetamine addict.
“It’s perfect,” says Thrall. “It’s like hearing someone else tell their story. They’ve done a wonderful job, and I was very proud of the producer credit they gave me.”
It’s been a long journey to get there. Thrall left the Marines aged 25 to run a network-marketing business selling security products in Hong Kong, where his life gradually unravelled. It took him a long time after returning to the UK to publish Eating Smoke.
He continued to struggle with addiction and when he got home “my parents were told they had to place me in a mental institution. Most of my friends gave up on me.” But he has also paid his way through a university degree in youth and community work, and worked as a substance abuse specialist; backpacked through more than 80 countries; driven a coach from Norway to India and back for charity; led a team of explorers from Sweden to Iceland in a vintage army truck; travelled to the Antarctic to dive amid icebergs; and become the father of an 18-month-old son, an experience that has evidently given him more pleasure than anything else.
There’s an obvious line of danger and extremity that runs from his military career, through his full-throated embrace of intoxication and all the scrapes it got him into, to his ambitious-bordering-on-reckless charitable ventures. “I never do things by halves,” he says. “I’m prone to extreme behaviour. There’s a compulsiveness in me. It’s the same with writing.”
He started writing Eating Smoke in 2008. “I’d never written anything before in my life except university essays, but I knew I had it in me to be a writer. But I could only write when I was off my head; I didn’t have any enthusiasm for it when I was sober. Crystal meth opened that doorway to creativity, and the spark went away when I was sober. I dabbled at it for three or four years. I’d write 1,000 or so words when I was high, but I was recovering from addiction, so those times became further and further apart – once every few months.