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"Britain's hidden alcoholics" by @campbellclaret. It made me cry.
This was an incredibly powerful programme presented by Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret). Anne Robinson says she nearly died. I nearly did too – on June 1st 2007 I was admitted to the Accident and Emergency Unit of the Royal Free Hospital NHS Hampstead, having sustained an aystolic cardiac arrest and epileptic seizure. I then stayed in a coma for six weeks in ITU due to proven acute bacterial meningitis.
Nick Lessar, paramedic, remarked that he thought that people who’d fallen victim to alcohol excess on the streets of London were mainly professional people, and this observation apparently is confirmed by the Office for National Statistics. Alastair describes how he started off as a problem drinker, before he started drinking to excess. He described how felt he was good at hiding it, and indeed I have found from my own experience that alcoholics tend to become expert liars.
Like Alastair, I have never bought the argument that 24/7 style drinking works. My late father was the first to agree. Like Alastair, I also believe that this licensing is to be lame. I used to drink at home on my own, after a full day’s work; I don’t think as a professional I am the first or last to have done this. Furthermore, alcohol is cheap from supermarkets, so like as explained by Prof Ian Gilmore, former President of the Royal College of Physicians, proponent of the ‘Alcohol Health Alliance‘ I feel a safer environment was provided by traditional pubs.
Alcohol problems cost the country £2.7 billion last year. 41% of professional people apparently drink more than the recommended limit. My concern is that the legal and medicine professions are full of them. Many City firms are within a stone’s throw of pubs. Lawyers with problems need to know where to get help, and fast. 9,000 people a year die of alcohol-related disease.
One person describes that her life was “spiritually and morally bankrupt”. I recognise this aspect of many alcoholics.
I paid a very high price. Not only in terms of my working life so far, I ended up in a wheelchair. I learnt how to walk again, thanks to the wonderful help of the physiotherapists and occupational health therapists at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. I learnt how to speak again thanks to the wonderful Speech and Language Therapists there. My late Father witnessed the worst of it, but thankfully he lived long enough to witness the beginning of my recovery. And, for the record, I now walk and talk absolutely normally.
I have, originally from a wheelchair, completed my Bachelor of Laws. I then did a LLM by distance learning in international commercial law. Last year, I completed a MBA, and I am now doing the Legal Practice Course. I had a two hour interview with the Solicitors Regulation Authority in December 2010, having disclosed I had a previous problem with it. By that stage, I had been only 3 years in recovery. Now I am four years in recovery. I know that if I have another drink I’ll keep going, and I’ll be dead.
Drink does endanger work, health, relationships and their lives, as explained by Alastair. Like Alastair, I went to Cambridge, and my gut feeling is that alcoholism is far from simply only a working class problem. In fact, one might say that universities like Oxbridge have a formidable drinking culture, with numerous drinking culture and the notorious ‘Suicide Sunday’ at Cambridge in May Week. The professions need to have a strong attitude to getting professional away from harm’s way in being near the public. Someone though has to pick up the pieces to ensure that these ill people get help. I picked myself up.
Well, never mind, you live and learn. I’ve met, though, some wonderful people on the way, and they know who they are. Like Alastair, you spend ages pretending you’re not an alcohol, until you finally have to give up the pretence. I agree with Alastair’s Psychiatrist, though – I don’t think it’s safe for people like me to drink at all.
The author is the Shibley, President of the BPP Legal Awareness Society, a student society for all BPP students to promote the understanding of law and regulation to corporate strategy. He tweets at @legalaware.
Lawyers and alcohol
I have a huge interest in the effects of problem drinking and addiction to alcohol, and in recovery. However, a bit like my other interest disability, there’s a limit to how many ‘white elephants’ I can talk about in relation to the legal profession, otherwise the ‘white elephant’ in currency terms will become devalued. Notwithstanding that, lawyers who have a drink problem do need medical help, I feel. It’s probably true that the vast majority of lawyers and law students know how to have a social drink, and shouldn’t be unfairly stigmatised for doing so.
Like London buses, nothing was in eyesight, until several sightings came along at once recently for me. Alex Aldridge on Monday set the ball rolling with his article in the Guardian, “Law’s problem with alcohol is slowly being addressed – but is still hush-hush“. The article explains elegantly how drinking is indeed said to be part of the culture in deal-making particularly in the City, but also explains how there may be a spectrum of lawyers from ‘law anoraks’ who are driven by academic results to those with severe dependence problems. It is my belief that true alcoholics are those people who do not know how to stop at one drink, so will nearly always keep going until something catastrophic occurs. On Thursday, Paul Venton, Chairman of LawCare, wrote a truly terrific piece in the Law Gazette entitled, “A heartfelt thanks”. Paul writes, “On many occasions, the assistance we have been able to provide to those afflicted by the curses of drug or alcohol dependency, or the debilitating effect of stress in their lives, has avoided personal and practice tragedies and the wider ramifications they entail.”
I believe robustly that those with true dependency problems will need to spend a life in recovery for their own safety, but for individuals with mild problems more bespoke medical help may be suitable. This is one person’s view, and not advice to other law students or practising lawyers. On Wednesday evening, I was gripped by a lecture by Prof David Nutt, @profdavidnutt, an academic who was sacked as being the Government’s advisor on drugs by the last government but who is now Chair of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. In a pleasant chat after the lecture, held at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, I suggested to him that a team of his PhD students or postdocs should look at the frequency of ‘alcohol’ appearing in the Part II of death certificates in the UK, and examining whether this tallied up with the prevalence or incidence of alcoholism in vivo in the UK.
Prof Nutt interestingly provided that he had found the Liberal Democrats the most in line with his personal views about the tone of regulation. His lecture, chaired by Prof Guy Goodwin from the University of Oxford Warneford Hospital for psychiatry, described how the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was not ‘fit for purpose’, the Dutch cafe experiment, how the harm from alcohol was often much more than from other drugs, how alcohol abuse was globally a cause of disability according to WHO, how alcohol was recently not allowed even through necessity for medicinal purposes, the distinction between legalisation and decriminalisation (in the Q/A session afterwards), “equasy”, and how Francis Crick is alleged to have dreamt up the structure of DNA, amongst many other issues. It was obvious that Prof Nutt felt the debate about the regulation of drugs had been stifled in recent years, but strongly urged people to keep up-to-date with the latest developments on his blog, particularly since reports in the media were so unreliable.
Please get Prof David Nutt to the House of Lords quickly! by Shibley Rahman
I really object to the disgraceful way in which some ‘responsible’ bloggers have portrayed the Nutt story. I must admit to nearly dying on the ITU of the Royal Free Hospital in 2007 during a two month coma due to meningitis, but with an underlying diagnosis of alcoholism. So, some bloggers were saying yesterday that heroin is far more dangerous than alcohol; my drug of abuse is more harmful than yours. I find this objectionable, as they are all potentially fatal.
I applaud David Nutt’s work. I hope that he may go to the House of Lords, before we elect him anyway.
Dr Shibley Rahman Queen’s Scholar BA MA MB BChir MRCP(UK) PhD FRSA LLB(Hons)
