High Sobriety (27 page)

Still, as he speaks of the fragility of his own mortality, he equivocates when asked if he thinks he's an alcoholic. He stresses that his doctor classified him as a heavy drinker, not an alcoholic. In rehab, he didn't believe the term was an apt description. And now? ‘In some capacity, by some classification, to some degree, I'm an alcoholic. Maybe not the classic category-five alcoholic, but in some manner I am.'

I'm astonished that someone who was drinking 18 cans of beer every day, and has been through withdrawal that left his body wracked by tremors, is talking about degrees of addiction. When I stopped drinking, I had no unpleasant symptoms. I felt better immediately. Yet, as we wind the interview up and the conversation shifts to my abstinence, it's clear that he sees me as a kindred soul. He asks if I'll go back to drinking when my year is up. I don't know how to answer. As I umm and aah, his eyes fix on mine and, for the first time in more than an hour, he's not smiling. His expression is urgent. ‘You have to ask yourself, who do you want the new Jill Stark to be? Is this Jill Stark happier than the old one? Do you like yourself more now or before?' It's an avenue I'm not comfortable exploring with a relative stranger, but then I look at the notepad resting on my knees and see the most intimate details of his private life. I tell him that I'm definitely happier now. I've gained a lot from not drinking, but I'm hoping I can find a middle ground. Ideally, I'd like to drink moderately, but I worry that my track record suggests I'm no good at this. I don't tell him that I've been fantasising about getting drunk.

It's hard to imagine a life without the occasional Saturday-night blowout, I say. It's how I've lived for 20 years. It's how my friends live. He tells me that I'll have to learn to be brutal with my friends. ‘It will take two years to change the social structure around Jill Stark,' he says. ‘It's the rock climber–ambulance driver scenario. If you hang around with rock climbers, they're going to tell you how sensational it is — the exhilaration, the fun; they're going to tell you it's such a thrill and you'll really love it. If you hang around with ambulance drivers, they're going to tell you about the broken bones they see, the horrible injuries, the deaths.'

I don't begrudge him the sermon. This man hit rock-bottom only to find there were seven layers of hell hidden in the basement. Like many who embark on that journey, he can't bear the thought of anyone else suffering the same fate. Just as he took his drinking to the extreme, his passion for sobriety has an intensity that borders on evangelism. He doesn't mean to, but the pressure he places on me when he says, ‘Jill, I really hope you don't drink again,' is heavy. I don't know if he's pleading for me or for himself. He's co-opted my story as his own. I don't want the responsibility of my sobriety somehow being tied to his.

He tells me that he wants to be an ambassador for people battling alcohol problems. ‘My message that I've got from all of this is that there needs to be more of a campaign of watching your mates. Watch your family, watch your friends, because they're people like me, who do slip into oblivion. People like us, who used to go out and get hammered on a Friday night — it evolves into a bigger problem for us.'

At the time, when he says ‘people like us', I think he's referring to others like him, who have sought treatment for a drinking problem. Listening back to my tape later, I'm not so sure. In his eyes, we are both lifelong members of the ‘High Sobriety' club. Or at least we should be. But despite the respect and admiration I have for this man, who has overcome such challenges and now wants to share that wisdom, I don't think we're the same. I've never felt the need to drink every day. I can't conceive of a future in which my daily routine would include knocking back half a bottle of gin or the best part of a slab of beer. But I don't suppose Will ever imagined himself that way, either. He's a professional, high-functioning man with a stable home life, whose binge drinking got away from him. He's only seven years older than me. Who knows where I would have been seven years from now if I hadn't taken this step back?

I'VE BEEN INVITED
to judge a short-story competition run by Odyssey House, one of Australia's largest drug and alcohol treatment centres. When the entries arrive in the mail, I'm impressed by the standard of writing. The work is supposed to be fictional, but many of the stories are so searing and visceral, they could only have come from lived experience.

Entrants must include reference to alcohol or drugs in the piece, and write to the theme ‘how did I get here?' One writes about a teenager's reluctant visit to her father. There are marijuana plants growing on his balcony, and he smokes a bong in front of her with a stoned friend. Another tells the story of a woman whose gambling debts spiral out of control. The narrator mocks the positive-thinking, ‘life is for living' messages she sees on television and in magazines. ‘Life is where you end up and you just get through all the shit the best you can. Right now, I'm up to my neck in it, and the shovel I've got has a very short handle.' One story, told from the perspective of a boy whose mother died of a drug overdose, conveys his confusion and terror as he's placed in the care of the state when his father, also an addict, is sentenced to 12 years in jail for armed robbery.

But the standout winner moves all three judges to tears. It's the story of an out-of-control 15-year-old girl. She hides vodka in her school locker and turns up to class stoned. There has been no love in her life. When Maryann, a motherly addiction counsellor, tries to reach out to her, she runs away, seeking solace in the bed of a nameless stranger: ‘My heart had no room for anyone — not even me.' But slowly she learns to trust Maryann, and reveals the secret of her sexual abuse. This story, hauntingly real and yet remarkable in its restraint, is made all the more poignant when we learn that it's a eulogy to Maryann, who passed away not long after coming into the girl's life. Yet, despite the grief, she finds a way out of her hopelessness and goes on to have a family of her own, ending the story with a question: ‘How did I get so lucky?'

In a meeting at Odyssey House Victoria's Richmond head-quarters with the other judges — author and child-protection campaigner Barbara Biggs, and Odyssey's chief executive Stefan Gruenert — we are unanimous in our decision. It leaves me thinking of this young woman's struggle, and I realise something. My ‘fuck it, I just want to get smashed' moments are usually about boredom and pleasure-seeking. When I get drunk, it's a choice. For so many others, it's about obliteration — a way to block out the pain. Yet, despite the tragic circumstances that cause already vulnerable people to seek solace in a bottle or through a needle, as a community we still treat addiction as if it's a character failing. How often do we turn our heads as we judge the unpleasant-smelling man staggering through the train carriage? It's funny how we view public drunkenness as socially unpalatable if it's an old man drinking Scotch from a brown paper bag, but it's a bit of fun if it's a group of young women causing a commotion on a hen's night. It makes me wish, once again, that I'd shown more compassion to my granddad. I was young, but I still judged him.

After we make our decision, I stay behind to chat to Stefan. The stories we've read are real life for many of the people he sees in treatment at Odyssey House. He hopes that this inaugural short-story competition will encourage others to share their experiences of drug and alcohol addiction. The stigma of substance abuse is fairly entrenched, he says, but it's slowly changing. Those who have long toiled in this unglamorous sector of health prevention and rehabilitation are starting to see a shift, both here and overseas — people struggling with addiction are choosing to waive anonymity and to publicly celebrate their road to recovery. They and others are giving addiction a visible presence, through walks organised by groups such as the United Kingdom's Recovery Academy, and Faces and Voices of Recovery in the United States. Melbourne's first recovery walk is scheduled for 2012. Central to the movement's philosophy is that everyone's road out of addiction will be different and, to borrow a cliché, recovery is not a destination but a journey.

‘Previously, recovery had a whole lot of baggage around it. It was just the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, and you had to say, “I'm an alcoholic or a drug addict and I will be for life, and I'm going to completely give up.” It worked for a lot of people, but it wasn't very inclusive,' Stefan says. ‘Recovery's now much broader, less concerned about the definition and more a movement for people to celebrate wellbeing and change, and for inspiring others to think about their quality of life. Whether you're still using or not, you can be in recovery — even if you're working towards it.'

By lifting the veil on addiction, in the same way that mental illness is slowly being demystified, the hope is that more people will seek help, and that the public will come to view substance dependency as they do any other medical condition. ‘You don't have cancer and [feel as if you have to] be anonymous, and that's part of the shift,' Stefan says. ‘All of the self-help fellowship movements have been very underground and hidden because of the shame and stigma. It just feels like the timing's right for people who have their own personal journeys of addiction to suddenly be okay to start sharing their stories and not lose their job or fear that that's going to hurt them. We're at the start of some upswing here, where you'll see more of the people like Ben Cousins — not just the high-profile people but at all levels of society — sharing their story in workplaces and at barbecues, saying, “Actually, I had issues years back and I'm better now.”'

When Cousins, one of the AFL's biggest stars and arguably one of the greatest to ever play the game, had his very public fall from grace, there were many lining up to condemn him. He had fled a booze bus, spent time in a Los Angeles rehab clinic, and been arrested for drug possession, which led to a 12-month playing ban for bringing the game into disrepute. He was a supremely talented, wealthy young man with Hollywood good looks, who seemed to be throwing it all away for the sake of a party. Yet, following a screening of a documentary outlining Cousins' battles with substance abuse, Channel Seven invited Australian Drug Foundation chief executive John Rogerson to explain the complexities of addiction to the audience at home. For Rogerson, and for many others in the field, it was a sign that addiction was starting to be taken seriously by mainstream media, and to be viewed as a health problem rather than a lifestyle choice.

But sometimes the spotlight can be a curse. As more people seek help, treatment services are buckling under the weight of demand. Between 2000 and 2010, there was a 29 per cent increase in the number of publicly funded treatments for drug and alcohol problems in Australia, with booze being the principal drug of addiction in nearly half (48 per cent) of all cases, up from 37 per cent of cases in 2000. These figures don't include those who drink heavily while using another drug. In Victoria, the Salvation Army estimates that the drug and alcohol treatment sector is already under-funded by at least 50 per cent. Nationally, the situation's no better. Those in the sector complain that politicians are quick to allay middle-class paranoia about violent smackheads and the rise of illegal drugs, however spurious the evidence, but are loath to tackle a legal substance that wreaks widespread havoc — perhaps because it's a drug that most voters enjoy on a regular basis.

A senior drug and alcohol–sector professional told me that they were once forced to sit next to a politician at a press conference, nodding in stony-faced agreement as the pollie announced a multi-million-dollar crackdown on methamphetamine. The money came after a series of hysterical and largely unfounded stories in sections of the media that claimed there had been a massive spike in the use of the drug, often known as ‘ice', ‘meth', or ‘crystal meth'. There was a heightened level of concern about this nasty substance, which can cause users to be aggressive and delusional. Yet there was no evidence of an ice epidemic on the streets of Melbourne. Still, when the government comes knocking, you don't turn them away. They smiled for the cameras and accepted the funds. Then, much of the money was spent where it was needed most — in alcohol-treatment services.

In 2008, Labor announced that $53 million was to be committed to a national binge-drinking strategy, to be rolled out over four years from 2009. But much of the money has gone to anti-drinking campaigns and early intervention for young people; very little has been spent on the treatment sector. Like other rehab facilities across Australia, Odyssey House has experienced a massive increase in the number of people presenting with alcohol problems in the last decade. At any given time, there can be 100 or more people waiting for a place in Odyssey's residential rehabilitation facilities. Stefan says that only about 10 per cent of people with a drinking problem will seek help, compared to up to 80 per cent of those with an illicit drug habit. When people reach that fork in the road, just as Will did — where left means oblivion and right means survival — they can easily be hurried down the wrong path if there's a long wait for treatment. Will was fortunate that he could afford a private facility, but even then he waited several weeks before a place in residential rehab came up.

In the public system, the situation is dire. Demand grows exponentially every year. I'm reminded of a man who left a comment online, underneath my binge-drinking story, in April. He'd been fighting alcoholism for 26 years. ‘I wish I could give up for a few days let alone a few months or a lifetime … my liver is getting more fragile and I can tell brain damage is setting in. I'm not stupid … [I] have two degrees, teaching at university and about to start a PhD.' He lamented the lack of publicly funded treatment options for those with alcohol addiction, predicting that he'd have to get much more seriously ill before being offered support. ‘Of course, if I get taken out of my house in a body bag I'll be sadly beyond help.'