From the heights of ecstasy, he plunged into the depths of despair - literally.

Overdosed on a potentially deadly cocktail of glue, sleeping pills and alcohol, Mr Lim Sing Sing (above, with wife Goh Lee Sah) had jumped from the 15th-storey kitchen window of his North Bridge Road flat. That was 16 years ago, when he was 26.

Two months later, he woke up in a hospital bed to find himself paralysed from the waist down. He had broken both arms and legs, and his spine. He needed steel plates in seven places in his limbs.

'I didn't even know I had jumped. I woke up shocked and depressed,' he said.

But even as he got used to being wheelchair-bound, he could not shake off his drug habit. During his 10-month stay in hospital, he got friends to smuggle in drugs.

'I was so down, I felt helpless and I wanted the pills to escape,' said Mr Lim, now 43.

He was merely 13 when he and his gang of friends got into glue-sniffing.

He attributed his downfall to a messy family background. His father was in a secret society and his mother was a gambler. He left school after failing his Secondary 1 exams.

'We would sniff openly on the streets,' he recalled.

When bicycle shops refused to sell him tyre-patching glue, he turned to stationery and furniture glue.

'I got so high, I would lose consciousness and wake up in the drain,' he said. He eventually became a heroin addict.

But, with counselling, Mr Lim later checked into Breakthrough Mission, a Christian centre for addicts. He slowly rebuilt his life and is now a finance executive in the centre and happily married to part-time cashier Goh Lee Sah, 34. The couple are expecting their first child in July.

His advice for today's youth: 'A drug addiction will haunt you for life. Don't even start.'

This story was first published in thesundaytimes on Apr 20.