In a BBC3 documentary, ‘Russell Brand: From Addiction To Recovery’, the 37-year-old comedian gives a peek at his early-20s years when he was hooked to heroin; and also tries to draw attention to the importance of rehabilitation programmes for treating drug addicts so as to eventually make them drug-free.

About the present government policy of prescribing a synthetic opioid called methadone to drug-addicts, hoping that their intake of illegal drugs will diminish gradually, Brand is of the opinion that methadone is a bad way of treating heroin addicts.

Voicing his views against the use of methadone to treat heroin addicts, Brand says: "We might as well let people carry on taking drugs if they're going to be on methadone. Obviously it's painful to abstain, but at least it's hope-based."

Meanwhile, the documentary, to be telecast on Thursday at 9pm, shows Brand watching an old video clipping of himself smoking heroin; and also admitting that even though he is no longer addicted to the drug, he still has to often fight his drugs cravings, almost every day.

Brand reveals that he was kicking about with a bunch of so-to-say ‘associates’, for whom illegal substance abuse had become a difficult-to-break vicious circle; and they often had to resort to some criminal activity to fund their drugs needs.

Though Brand eventually became clean in 2002 with help from an abstinence-based recovery programme, he clearly admits in the documentary that a decade back, he “couldn’t get enough — cannabis, booze, speed, acid, coke, crack, smack;” and that he “took drugs every single day.”