Man who spent £2.2m on drugs describes side effect that felt like 'living in hell'

Warning: This article contains discussion of drug addiction which some readers may find distressing.

A dad struggling with addiction has revealed the side effects of his £2.2 million drug habit.

Shane Samler, from Essex, has opened up about the physical toll of cocaine-use which began when he was 15.

Now 38, the father-of-three recalled when his nose collapsed over on his TikTok channel (@shanesas86).

“So before my nose had collapsed, obviously when it was collapsing, the pain was horrendous. I'd get on it then an hour before I'd finish getting on it, I'd start taking painkillers,” he said in a video from May.

Shane said he would take ‘a pack of paracetamols a day’ to deal with the pain until it ‘stopped working’.

“Then I was on paracetamols, norepinephrine, co-codamols as well at the same time. I couldn't sleep for more than an hour and a half. I'd wake up, have to take some more and then go back to sleep,” he added.

Co-codamol is a combination painkiller made of paracetamol and codeine, used to treat moderate aches and pains when basic painkillers do not work.

“And then none of that was working so I used to have to go to the hospital to get Oramorph because they wouldn't prescribe it because I was a drug addict so they used to give me oral morph mate and that was the only time I could sleep,” Shane said, with Oramorph being the brand name for morphine sulfate oral solution, a fast-acting liquid opioid painkiller used to treat severe pain or persistent breathlessness.

“The pain was horrendous, it was awful and then towards the end that wouldn't even stop it, it would stop when I had Oramorph and lay in the sun like the heat on my face. It was a summer when that was.

“It really was awful. Then I went in the priory not long after. Yeah, and that was that. That was that, my jaw had all seized up.

“Yeah, it weren't good. That was literally like living in hell. Do you know what I mean? I know there's something else because I've been to hell.”

Shane says he is currently two months clean and is happy to raise awareness of addiction to his 122,000 followers on TikTok.

Around 2.1 percent of adults aged 16 to 59 in England and Wales reported using powder cocaine in the year ending March 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The UK remains one of the highest consumers of cocaine in Europe.

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