High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and Other Bad Behaviour

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Former infantry officer and Times correspondent Antony Loyd fled depression and drug addiction at home to the front lines of Bosnia, witnessing barbaric chaos in what was Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the Second World War. The guy who wrote this describes himself as an arsehole early on, but even arseholes can be interesting when they're talking about something they have specialist knowledge of which others don't. Starting with Ben’s first near-death experience in a Nazi-themed bar in wartime Yugoslavia, High Risk is a whirlwind tour of everything from service in the SAS, combat in Iraq, encounters with a gambling-obsessed 9/11 hijacker and steroid-fuelled mercenaries, to veterans blissed out on MDMA, hook-ups in the world of extreme sex, and battling a heroin habit on a remote Scottish island. The poor me attitude of intentionally getting addicted to heroin and then going and living on a remote island is almost a caricature. It is a fascinating exploration of addiction, altered states of consciousness, belief v truth, fanaticism, and oh, so much else.

The regular forays into cliché and overblown metaphor are cringe-worthy at times, and the occasional attempts to reassure us he's not an arsehole ("young mothers are doing the most important job in the world" - spare us) are laugh out loud (in a bad way). From the peak flow-states attained during combat in Iraq to the descent into five years of heroin addiction, Timberlake has always welcomed seemingly impossible challenges – using his body and mind as the petri dish for daring and controversial experiments. But personally, I gobble up most artistic output for its imperfections - and a story such as this needs to err to be so human.I guess I am somewhat stupid to think this kind of read could be anything else, but to me it seemed to lack humility and ultimately left me very cold, and a bit bored if I’m honest. To explore whether this rate could be enhanced by a nudging strategy that exploits the status quo bias, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in northern Italy comparing vaccination acceptance amo. An intimate, deep and poignant account of the adrenaline-driven yet toxic nexus of war, sex and drugs, Timberlake's memoir is as disturbing as it is addictively absorbing. It's difficult to even review, as this was probably the most brutally honest book I have read or listened to at least in a long time.

A lot of the time, when someone would riddle an Iraqi family’s car with bullets, there would be steroids in the background. Once he got there, he ended up smoking a lot of crystal meth and was almost killed by the religious police for selling porn.

Together, they share their uncompromising personal accounts of embracing fear and choosing to live life at the very extreme, revealing what happens when you’re taken over the edge. There’s no threat in the world when you’re on vast amounts of MDMA, so you can revisit this stuff and you can talk about it. Join authors Ben Timberlake and Antony Loyd as they share their uncompromising personal accounts of embracing fear and choosing to live life at the very extreme, revealing what happens when you’re taken over the edge. Inspired by a fellow SAS soldier, whose father was a “committed junkie with a three-decade habit”, Timberlake decides to deliberately get himself hooked on heroin, “to touch the bottom of the abyss”. What I don’t know is whether we will start seeing court cases from former soldiers – because I would imagine that if you were witnessing a traumatic incident and you were on a stimulant, you would be more likely to suffer from PTSD.