Trolling the skanky alleyways of Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Lower East Side, looking for his next fix … it wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

Gordon Lownds’s career was peaking, and he was leading the high-stakes start-up of Sleep Country Canada (now a billion-dollar-plus enterprise).

But with one impulsive ill-fated act, he succumbed to the intoxicating allure of a cunning femme fatale—and her toxic twin: cocaine. His once-prosperous, promising life soon descended into a 1,000-day nightmare of hard-core drug addiction, debauchery, and self-destructive excess.

Plagued by the volatile vagaries of drug dealers, hookers, and bikers—not to mention extortion and death threats—he was putting his company at risk. And as his life crashed around him, he became steeped in self-loathing, bottomless remorse, and unbearable anxiety. Could he hold it all together, or was catastrophe inevitable?

Trapped in the jaws of addiction, he believed death was the only escape.

In a desperate act of self-preservation, he reached out for help. Thus began a twisted, years-long carnival ride through treatment and recovery that spawned its own confounding challenges, exacerbated when Gordon suddenly became a multimillionaire.

For most, the path to healing and freedom from addiction is a road less traveled. Gordon is one of the lucky ones.