Editor’s Note: Last week we kicked off a series of articles on addiction. We asked you for your experiences. Here is the first of many contributions which have been sent in by our readers. I make no apology for the headline. If you would like to contribute please contact us at [email protected].
Another death, another talented person gone too young. Although it’s important to remember that no one actually yet knows what killed Amy Winehouse, the Camden based star had become synonymous with a lifestyle soaked in alcohol.
So, Welsh Icons have asked me to expound upon a subject about which I know far far far too much – alcohol abuse.
Perhaps it would be more pertinent to attach my spiel to a few deaths we know are attributable to the demon drink. Those of five men killed in an explosion in an illegal alcohol factory in Lincolnshire earlier in July.
What’s that about? Illegal stills and the like are supposed to be the stuff of prohibition aren’t they? Alcohol is not, by any stretch of the imagination illegal in this country, yet, it’s obviously worth counterfeiting, and people are ready to take risks to fool the tax man both as producers and consumers.
The most recent figures I can find come from 2009, when totting up all the drink and drink-related treatments in the UK, were said to cost the NHS £3billion-a-year. That’s not so good.
As a nation – and that’s all of us, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, English – we like a drink. Got a new job? Have a drink to celebrate. Lost your job? Shit! Let me buy you a drink to commiserate. Birthday. Christmas. Leaving school. Work over for the week and so-on and so-on. There isn’t a rite of passage in this country that isn’t routinely marked with booze.
The thing is, it would appear that it probably always was like that. Everyone by now will have heard the story of the Anglo Saxon’s famed pre-battle piss ups. It was still going, of course, in the First World War, when a tot of rum was the stiffener for going over the top – and who can blame them, I’d want to be off my head if I was expected to walk across No Man’s Land towards thousands of well dug in enemy troops.
I shan’t regale you here with my own personal little sob story (if you wish to keep score however, the shorthand is at the very least: most of an education one good job, one relationship, one beloved career, four suicide attempts and I don’t even want to think about the money). You’ll have read similar elsewhere, I’m sure. I think the only relevant thing my experience can bring to any debate on alcohol and drug (yep, been there too) abuse, is my almost certain knowledge that I was – cheers Gaga – born this way. I have the family history, I had the childhood problems with anxiety and depression and I had an absolute fricking epiphany the first time I got drunk. I’ll let Charles Bukowski, probably the greatest writer on drink of the 20th Century put it into words better than I can:
“With this, life was great, a man was perfect, nothing could touch him.”
I suspect Amy was the same. I suspect – in fact, in a lot of cases I know – that a lot of the people I’ve met over the years in various treatment centres, detoxes and counselling sessions were the same.
But where does that leave us?
It won’t – on this occasion – go without saying that the vast majority of people in this, as in every other country, are perfectly capable of drinking in a way which doesn’t screw up their lives. It’s not right for laws to be passed for the, what some recent reading I’ve done suggests is, around 10% of people who’re going to have a problem with drink. I’m quite in sympathy with those who complain about such things as minimum unit pricing putting up the cost of their booze in order to deter those who will end up in the gutter from starting – while it’s unlikely it’ll stop the really predetermined it might reduce their numbers slightly, whether you think that’s worthwhile is up to you.
The answer, for me and for the most part at least, is a big “Don’t ask me, I only abuse the stuff.”
I was heartened to hear recently of studies showing that fewer young people than before are drinking at the moment. Long may it continue, it’s a cultural thing and a cultural change is really the only thing that will have any long-term effect.
I started my dance with drink very young and I think that’s particularly dangerous – by finding an – albeit the wrong – answer to all my problems I never had to look anywhere else. It’s clichéd I know, but empty, meaningless, boring lives are perfect fodder for alcohol abuse, but to make a society where we all have fulfilled, meaningful, interesting lives is a big ask.
So, to finally get round to the point. I would be very strict on our current laws, particularly with regards to off licences, frankly, if they’re caught selling to anyone underage I’d take their licence off them. Drinking in pubs at least brings some sort of social pressure to behave responsibly in a way that just isn’t there with eight cans of White Lighting and your mates in the park. I’d also rebalance the cost to encourage pubs and, yes, I probably would introduce some sort of minimum price.
It’s not much of an answer really is it. What’s yours?
