High Sobriety (28 page)

As more people find the confidence to speak up about their battles with alcohol, Stefan fears that a system already at breaking point will be swamped. ‘We're getting a lot of people in their mid to late thirties, but we're also getting people right into their sixties, and I think that's going to be another emerging issue among older Australians. We've got a growing cohort of people going to be entering aged care, and a lot of them have had drinking patterns all their life that have been pretty unhealthy. How are we going to manage those people?'

At the other end of the spectrum is a young generation of drinkers who have grown up in a culture that embraces excess and teaches them to mark every life event with alcohol. For most teens, binge drinking won't lead to dependency. But for some, it's the gateway to addiction. The number of young people being treated for alcohol-related brain damage grew five-fold in a decade. Arbias, one of Australia's only treatment services for brain injuries caused by drinking, saw the number of patients aged 16 to 25 jump from 120 in 1997 to 600 in 2007.

A few years ago, I spent the day with the Youth Substance Abuse Service, Victoria's biggest treatment and support service for 12- to 25-year-olds. I visited its residential rehabilitation centre and drop-in day program in Fitzroy, an area traditionally associated with high rates of drug and alcohol problems. About 30 young people, mostly under the age of 21, visited it daily. I like to think I'm a fairly worldly-wise person, but I was shocked by what I found. There were kids there who had suffered unimaginable neglect and abuse. Some of them sold themselves on the street to feed their habit; many were homeless. When the centre opened its doors in the late 1990s, heroin was the main problem, but now, overwhelmingly, it's alcohol. In a decade, the number of young people being treated for alcohol dependency has doubled. Some are so hooked they're drinking a slab of beer or two bottles of spirits a day.

After I leave Odyssey House, I go back to the Youth Substance Abuse Service, now known as the Youth Support and Advocacy Service, to see what's changed. I arrive at the Fitzroy residential withdrawal centre — an eight-bed facility for young people detoxing from alcohol and other drugs — and a support worker invites me into the living area, as I wait for chief executive Paul Bird to make his way over from the YSAS office nearby. It's a colourful space that feels like a big share house, with a pool table, couches, beanbags, and a pinboard filled with photographs of young people smiling and pulling faces. A punching bag hangs in the courtyard.

A guy, wearing a baseball cap and baggy jeans, walks past the dining table, where I'm waiting. He scowls at me as we make eye contact. He's gaunt and pale. Despite the tough exterior, he has a child's face — he can't be much older than 16.

When Paul arrives, I'm keen to know what kinds of back-grounds the kids who come here for help have. As it was when I last visited, he says that most of them come from broken homes, have been in trouble with the police, or have experienced homelessness. What's changed is that the service is now seeing more young people who came to Australia as refugees from Africa and Afghanistan, and have lost their way in our drinking culture. Alcohol abuse is so rife in those communities that the centre recently closed its doors to new referrals for a week to look after young Sudanese men exclusively.

‘Their parents have come from a stricter culture, where drinking and substance use are not practised regularly, and then they arrive here, to a very open culture, and they're all of a sudden put in an Australian school with Australian friends. Their friends are completely different from their family, so you see family breakdown as well,' Paul tells me. ‘They may have greater ties to community groups, but not to their parents and elders, so they kind of go from nought to 60 very fast. You see very heavy substance use in a very short period of time, and that's causing massive issues with anger and violence, not to mention that alcohol and drugs are used as a way to escape from the trauma they've experienced in their homeland.'

It's not surprising that these new Australians, suddenly furnished with freedom and access to cheap booze, would mimic the ways of their adopted country. And it almost certainly doesn't help that many migrants are being housed in already disadvantaged areas, such as Greater Dandenong, in Melbourne's south-east, which has the second-highest youth unemployment rate in Victoria.

But the increase in demand for treatment is not just in underprivileged communities. The YSAS helpline increasingly fields calls from parents in Melbourne's growth corridors. In these outer suburban areas, where there are inadequate or often non-existent public-transport links and few after-school activities for young people, excessive drinking is a burgeoning problem. Paul says: ‘People have moved there to get a bigger house. They see the developers' adverts, they see images of people frolicking in fields, and they go there as a lifestyle choice — and suddenly they've got a very big house, mortgaged to the hilt, their commute times have increased, both parents are at work, so the kids come home from school alone. They may end up with another peer group who doesn't go straight home from school, and that's where disengagement comes from. The stress, financially, is so great that families are just breaking up, but they still look prosperous because they've got big houses, they've got the McMansions. There's a kind of facade that there's wealth and wellbeing there, but if you look behind it, nobody sees that.'

Paul says, too, that while boredom, frustration, and the risk-taking nature of teenagers can contribute to them turning to alcohol, it's also behaviour they learn from their parents, many of whom drink to cope with financial and relationship problems. ‘In the past, [parents] may have had the social connections to deal with this, but now they're living in the outer suburbs, they have less connection. They're less engaged with their kids, and they're not established in local football or the myriad things that more-established suburbs have. There's more alcohol use, and anger and violence in the family, and learned behaviours that the kids have picked up as a result of their environment.'

Despite the increase in alcohol and drug problems in these communities, services like YSAS are trying to cater for such growing suburbs without extra funding. In six years of health reporting, I've watched the treatment sector buckle under the weight of seemingly never-ending growth in demand. Governments have talked tough on cracking down on alcohol-related violence and teenage binge drinking, yet those at the sharp end of the problem continue to flounder, with limited money to help those most in need. In March 2011, Victoria's auditor-general released a damning report, asserting that the state's drug and alcohol treatment system was chronically under-funded, after successive state Labor governments had failed to act on 31 system reviews over the last decade. As the politicians sat on their hands, waiting times for residential rehab had doubled. The report also revealed a revolving-door system, with 70 per cent of those treated later re-admitted, after suffering a relapse. And not only has funding failed to keep pace with the growth in demand, but it has actually gone backwards in terms of per-capita spending.

When former premier John Brumby released his much-vaunted Alcohol Action Plan for Victoria in 2008, it committed $14 million to awareness campaigns and help for GPs to support people with drinking problems, but gave no new funding to the treatment sector. The Baillieu government has pledged to address the problem, but services such as YSAS and Odyssey House won't see any new cash until the completion of a long public-consultation process — essentially, another system review.

In the meantime, I wonder what will happen to the teenagers who drink themselves into oblivion night after night, and find there's nowhere to go when they have a moment of clarity that gives them the impetus to seek help. How many of those disaffected kids in the outer suburbs will slip from binge drinking to dependency, when proper support might have prevented that trajectory?

It must be unbelievably frustrating for those who see firsthand how vital it is to treat addiction early. Awareness campaigns are simply not enough. But there is hope. They're buoyed by the rise of the recovery movement, and by youth-led organisations such as
Hello Sunday Morning
, which celebrate those who choose not to drink. They hope that, just as the boozy photos and status updates on Facebook create a social-contagion effect, the growing numbers of young people talking about taking a break from drinking or going teetotal will have a ripple effect in peer groups.

There's some evidence that this is already happening. It doesn't make the headlines, but there are a growing number of young people who are staying sober or delaying their first drink. The Australian School Students Alcohol and Drug Survey, which is carried out every three years and is considered the most reliable gauge of substance use in young people, shows that the number of 12- to 17-year-olds who had never had an alcoholic drink grew from 12 per cent in 2002 to 18 per cent in 2008, when the last survey was conducted. The 2010 National Drug Strategy Household Survey recorded that 77 per cent of 12- to 15-year-olds had not had a drink in the previous 12 months — up from 70 per cent in the 2007 survey. Among 16- to 17-year-olds, the proportion who had not drunk in the previous year increased from 24 per cent to 32 per cent over the two surveys.

What may help boost those numbers is the increasing list of celebrities who are proving that you can be sober and cool. British pop star Lily Allen gave up drinking after confessing her wild-child ways were turning her into a ‘character in a comic, and that character is always drunk'. In July, Oasis bad boy Liam Gallagher quit booze after ‘20 years drinking and messing about', and said that it improved his singing voice. And at the tender age of 21,
Harry Potter
star Daniel Radcliffe, hero to millions of children, turned his back on the bottle, saying he'd become too reliant on alcohol. He said he got swept away in the celebrity lifestyle and had been using booze to fit in. More locally, in June, 23-year-old Triple J radio host Alex Dyson became the 1000th person to take on the
Hello Sunday Morning
challenge, with a three-month break from drinking; the publicity from his decision led to an immediate jump in sign-ups.

This is perhaps the most powerful way to change an environment that makes it so difficult for young people to turn down a drink. It's not about telling younger Australians not to drink; it's about promoting the idea that alcohol is something you enjoy, not something you need. As Chris Raine says, ‘It's easy to get swept up in a drinking culture. Sometimes we just need a rope to pull us back to dry land.'

The question remains: is that rope strong enough to bear the weight of a generation at risk of being dragged under?

October

BEER, FOOTY, AND
a meat pie — it's the Australian way. But as fond as I am of booze combined with saturated fat wrapped in pastry, I haven't always been a fan of AFL. When I first arrived in Melbourne, I was all about the beautiful game. I'd been a diehard football fan since Dad first took me to see Hearts, one of two Edinburgh-based Scottish Premier League teams, when I was ten years old. I couldn't imagine loving any sport more. Football was life. It had flair, finesse, and skill.

All I knew about Aussie Rules football was that it was a tough, take-no-prisoners skirmish that often bore the hallmarks of an all-in pub brawl. It was high-scoring, fast, and physical. But I was unconvinced of its merit. Yet mid-way through the 2001 AFL home-and-away season, when I'd been living in Melbourne for just a few weeks, my then partner, Hugh, took me to footy's church. And there, in the roaring cauldron of the MCG, watching Hawthorn smash Collingwood, I was converted. This was the best game in the world.

It was the beginning of a long and often painful love affair with the Hawthorn Football Club. By the time my relationship with Hugh ended, the brown and gold had seeped under my skin and into my blood. Now, for six months of the year, football is my non-negotiable weekly ritual. It's electrifying, addictive, and at times soul-destroying.

Coming from a country where opposing fans are segregated, and alcohol is banned for fear that the crowd will erupt in violence, I initially found it odd that I could drink at the footy and sit where I liked. But for several years, beers before and at the game with my Hawks friends were part of the tradition — until I stopped drinking. Sometimes, the way Hawthorn play is enough to drive anyone to drink; but this season, sober and lucid, I've realised that my being drunk doesn't make the boys perform any better. When you're losing, that over-priced, mid-strength cooking beer you've been chugging back for four quarters suddenly seems like a massive waste of money. Yet when you're winning … well, that's a different story.

It's a long-established tradition, both here and where I grew up, to toast sporting success with a drink. Although historically, with the exception of some wins in curling and darts, there's been little to cheer about in Scottish sport, that hasn't stopped us from getting on the piss. One of the most common chants you'll hear from fans when the Scottish national football team plays is, ‘Here for the bevvy, we're only here for the bevvy.' So when Hearts beat Rangers to win the Scottish Cup in 1998, ending a 36-year trophy drought, it was a momentous occasion in our house. Dad had been a teenager when he last saw the boys in maroon get their hands on silverware. At the game, I cried tears of joy and relief when I watched my team lift the cup. Then, like most other long-suffering Jambos (Hearts = Jam Tarts = Jambos), I got absolutely hammered. I was pissed for three days. Nobody, not even my moderation-preaching father, questioned it. We'd earned the party.