Sleep Country co-founder reveals crack cocaine addiction in candid memoir

Gordon Lownds, co-founder of Sleep Country Canada, releases memoir "Cracking Up" on his addiction and recovery journey.

In 1996, Canadian entrepreneur Gordon Lownds was in the midst of two of the most pivotal moments of his life: The launch of the uber-successful Sleep Country Canada business, and the beginnings of an all-consuming drug addiction.

In Cracking Up, what Lownds describes as an “unlikely addict’s memoir,” the Toronto-born entrepreneur recounts his first ever experience with drugs aged 48, his quick descent into addiction and his subsequent recovery less than three years later.

The memoir, written a year after recovery, differs from others in that Lownds’ experience was as intense as it was brief. The addiction essentially lasted 1,000 days, he remarks, and had come after a lifetime abstaining from experimentation.

“I think I’ve been drunk like 10 times in my entire life, and I can remember each one of them,” he says from his home in Vancouver Island’s Black Creek.

“Booze was never a big thing with me, and I’d seen people’s lives get destroyed with drugs … and I just, I just never thought I would ever be in that situation.”

Lownds recounts his first experience with drugs as one that had been suggested and then egged-on by his then-girlfriend Annabelle, an exotic dancer from the United States. Just two years short of turning 50, the businessman was at the pinnacle of his career in the midst of expanding Sleep Country Canada’s four initial stores in Vancouver to include over a dozen more across the country.

“I was divorced. At the time, my family had moved back to Toronto. I was on my own in Vancouver. I got involved with a stripper from Seattle, which is obviously a bad decision,” he says.

Lownds recalls how he let Annabelle move into his penthouse apartment, against his “better judgment,” only to discover she had a hidden addiction to crack cocaine. One afternoon, after another row over her reluctance to complete the treatments Lownds had attempted to enroll her in, she requested he experience the drug to better empathize with her struggles.

It was an “ill-advised experiment” that saw him hooked on the substance within six months. Within the year, he was injecting the substance intravenously.

“It was a very rapid descent into the worst possible parts of an addiction,” he says.

Lownds transformed from being a lofty businessman terrified of stepping foot in the Downtown Eastside to becoming someone embroiled in the scene to such an extent that sex workers and drug dealers were comrades. Now, he laughs, he could “give tours” of the DTES.

Throughout the three-year period of addiction, Lownds estimates he spent over $700,000 on cocaine and the associated lifestyle that comes with it. Yet he describes himself as a high-functioning addict, professing his addiction didn’t impair his ability to drive the Sleep Country Canada business.

“From a business point of view, the world didn’t know that I had a problem,” he says.

Even in the midst of his recovery journey, spurred on by hitting “rock bottom” via an overdose and an arrest two years in, he was able to create the successful hearing aid retailer Listen Up! Canada.

“The recovery probably took me 10 years to get back on my feet, and within three or four years of getting clean, I started that second company, so I was functioning well enough to do that,” he says.

“And that turned out quite well.”

Lownds deters from the common tropes of addiction memoirs when he discusses his recovery. Instead of waxing lyrical about the treatment plans, he details the negativity that permeates the 12-step meetings and the tendencies attendees have to seek apologies for their past mistakes rather than genuine recovery. Such people are the reason why he abandoned meetings in favour of working with his own, personal psychiatrist, he says.

The book is honest, brutally so, and Lownds describes his drug and sex escapades in such an expletive-laden manner that he feels obliged to chime in at certain points to directly address the reader – he doesn’t ”want to offend,” he assures.

When asked whether he is concerned over the potential shifting of his public image in light of the book’s release, he seems unbothered.

“I’ve spent many, many years in business. I’ve made friends and I’ve made enemies, and I’m not particularly concerned about the people who might find this subject matter, or my story within that subject matter, offensive,” he says.

Lownds’ primary concern with exposing his experience so publicly was the effect it would have on the individuals who do matter – his daughter, his ex-wife, his business associates and close friends. It took time to “fix those relationships,” and now that trust is regained, 25 years on, Lownds says he feels comfortable publishing his story in the hopes that it will help others.

“It’s useful to share stories where some people have managed to conquer their demons and come out of it doing OK,” he said.

“It’s basically to give a sense of hope and deliver the message that, no matter how messed up you are, how screwed up your life is, it’s never too late to turn things around and fix things.”