January 2006
Sydney, Australia
I have only been living in Sydney for three weeks, and John is already one of my best friends ever. He is the reason I have not yet been anywhere near any of the lovely beaches, checked out the Opera House, or even gone for a stroll across the Harbour Bridge. He is there for me 24/7. John is my drug dealer.
I need a drug dealer because I am now officially a drug addict, working my way through between four to eight grams of cocaine a day every day - anywhere between 60 to 120 lines per day, or £200-£400 a day in real money - and have been doing so for the last four years. And I need a drug dealer in Sydney because this is where I have been posted by my employers, partly because I can still just about function and do a half-decent job for them, partly because my wife has made it very clear that I am no longer welcome in the family home, and partly because I have begged to be sent here because I believe with all my heart that if only I can get a long way away from London then I might just be able to stop taking drugs.
That particular notion lasted precisely three days. By day four I was going up the walls and suddenly it seemed that a quick line - just the one and then I'm back on the wagon - would be the perfect way to pep up a Saturday night. Obviously, inevitably, unavoidably, that one line became the usual four grammes and we are off again and running. Within a week, I am back where I was when I left London after Christmas, thanks to making the acquaintance of John and his massive medicine cabinet.
Still, at least now I know for sure: my name is Danny, and I am an addict. And I desperately need some help...
March 2006
Sydney-London
It is on my 15th visit to the toilet at the front of the business-class cabin when the duty officer finally cracks a knowing grin and enquires if sir is suffering from an especially weak bladder. Yes, sir is indeed suffering from precisely that, what with the two excellent bottles of Penfolds already horsed down before even leaving Australian airspace, not to mention the three or four massive jugs of port that have just accompanied the onboard selection of cheeses.
In itself, this amount of drink at this sort of altitude would not be a great idea. The bigger problem here, however, and the real reason behind sir's seemingly endless forays to the lavatory, is that sir has already hoovered up the guts of a gram of cocaine, the first of four to see me through the 23-hour flight back to London. I have it all worked out. Two to get me from Sydney to Singapore, two more to see me back home to London. The very fact that this means I am going to have to walk through Singapore's Changi Airport with two grams of a Class A drug in the back pocket of my shorts is the least of my worries right now.
I am, by now, beyond caring about such apparent trifles as a lengthy spell in a foreign prison. Instead, what I am caring an awful lot about - what I am caring about so much that I have to keep doing line after line just to keep the rising panic at bay - is that once these four little wraps run out, that's my lot. As in no more ever again. As in end of. As in what is waiting for me at Heathrow when I arrive is a big blacked-out people carrier, there to meet me, greet me, and whisk me all the way to the Priory.
I still cannot believe that I have finally made the decision to throw in the towel. To come clean, to break down in front of my employers. To tell them that I have a massive problem with drink and drugs, and that no matter how much I want to stop, how hard I have been trying every day for more than a year to stop, I just can't. And finally I say to them what I have been saying to myself over and over again every night for the last 18 months. My name is Danny, and I am an addict, and I desperately need some help.
In an act of extreme kindness that begins to restore my faith in human nature, they immediately arrange for me to be flown straight back to London for what they assure me will be a seven-day fast-track quick-fix programme of recovery. I will later find out that no such programme exists, and that they have wisely concluded that the idea of spending the recommended 28 days inside would have driven me straight back into the arms of my welcoming dealer.
I am met at Heathrow and whisked across town, through Richmond Park, and down the hill to the Priory. With the in-flight booze and cocaine raging around my system, I am convinced that we have arrived at a five-star hotel, an impression confirmed by the presence of men in uniform who even go to the trouble of unpacking my bags for me. This place is good. They won't even let you unpack. It is a few days later when I am told that this is otherwise known as Searching For Drugs. Thankfully, they don't find any, because obviously I have consumed every last white speck either on the plane or on the week-long binge that preceded it. Right now, I am starting to fade, and I just want to sleep for ever. I lie down, stare at the ceiling of room 15 in the Priory Hospital, Roehampton, and I close my eyes...
Easter 2005
London
I am in my basement in London, eight grams in a big bag next to me, hardcore pornography flickering on the TV, wife and kids thankfully away for the Easter weekend. I have been married to Jane for 15 years, and have two children, Jack, 12, and Molly, just eight years old. I love them all with all my heart, but right now I love cocaine just that little bit more. Somehow, somewhere in the last five years, what had begun with the occasional recreational line just to pep up the spirits, make it a proper night out for God's sake, has turned into a full-blown have-to-have it habit. I have now gone through the three classic stages of developing an addiction - this is fun, this is getting out of hand, this is fucking killing me and I can't stop - and I am starting to mess up on a regular basis both at home and at work.
Thankfully, I still have just enough sense left in me to try to keep it away from the kids. Jane, though, became aware of the situation maybe a year back - it would have been hard not to when your husband simply stops coming home of an evening - and has pleaded with me to get help. I will do, darling. Just not today.
My employers, whom I have been with now for more than 10 years, would also quite like me to stop, what with me no longer showing up on a regular basis. When I am there though, the drugs, unlike the drink, are harder to detect than you may imagine. It is like I am just a little bit out of it all the time, just a little bit gone, rather than the rip-roaring chaos that would accompany an afternoon on the piss. However, my immediate boss has already asked me how bad a habit I have. Not do I have a habit. Or am I possibly developing a habit. No, the question they asked was: how bad a habit do I have. I lie, as I now lie to everyone about pretty much everything, and we tentatively agree that it might make sense sometime soon to follow up on that conversation re: a temporary posting to Sydney. Good. If only I can get away from London, away from the stresses of life with the wife and the kids and the job, if only I can do all that, then surely to God I can get back to normal and get off the gear for good. But before then, before I really do stop I promise, before all that, I just need one more line. One more gram. One more ounce. One more one more one more...
Day 1, 3am
The Priory
I come round from my final transatlantic binge sometime in the early hours of Monday morning. I do not recognise this room. I am clearly no longer in my apartment in Sydney. But nor do I seem to be in my lovely old family house in west London. Instead, I appear to be in what looks like a private hospital bedroom. This latter impression is confirmed by the fact that there is a nurse standing over me, gently asking me if I need any medication to help me get back to sleep. She has been able to walk into my room because there is no lock on the door and there is no lock on the door in case I try to harm myself during the night.
I ask her one or two questions and she gently provides the answers. I am in the west wing of the Priory Hospital in Roehampton. The west wing houses those patients who, like me, are on the Addiction Therapy Programme. It is 3am on Monday morning and I have been out cold since I was poured in here straight off the flight on Saturday afternoon. I have slept for 36 hours. And I need to get back to sleep now because in just five hours' time I will have to be up and ready for the start of my programme. I thank her and tell her I will try to roll over and get some sleep.
And I do try. I try to close my eyes and blot it all out. I try not to keep reaching out over the side of my bed to find the drugs that are no longer there. I try not to think of Jane or Jack or Molly, safely tucked up just a few miles across town. And I try not to think of Aussie John or London Trev, my personal doctors, either of whom could so easily take away this pain, this awful guilt, this unbearable shame. I am 45 years old, a husband, father, and drug addict. Somehow, I have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, a long way away from the people and places I love. I start to cry, great heaving sobs, crying for myself, crying for my children, crying for my wife, crying to be fixed, crying to be anywhere other than here in the west wing of the Priory...
Day 1, 8am
The Priory
The night nurse comes back in for a final check on me around 8am. I have been wide awake now for five hours and am already starting to become all-too familiar with my immediate surroundings. In my room, I have my bed, two chairs, a desk, a portable TV, and a bathroom. Contrary to the popular perception of the Priory being some sort of five-star hotel, the sleeping accommodation at least is more akin to a standard provincial B&B. Each of the 20 or so rooms leads out on to a corridor, at the end of which, just to remind you one more time that you are currently residing in a psychiatric hospital, is a nursing station.
We live and sleep on the first floor of the west wing of the main Priory Hospital, the magnificent white building so familiar from the tabloid front pages of recent years. The business end of the operation, however, is tucked away in a corner on the far side of the grounds, in a small unprepossessing two-storey house known as Priory Lodge.
Every morning, following reveille and a quick breakfast in the hospital canteen, I walk across the grounds to the Lodge just in time for the official beginning of the day, the 15-minute group meditation kicking off at 9am. One of our group does a reading, and we are then encouraged to sit and stare straight ahead of us, blocking out all conscious thoughts, just staring and breathing as best we can. For the first few days, I can barely manage two minutes without having to get up and go outside for a cigarette, thoughts and guilt and shame and remorse crashing in on me from all sides.
It is after this morning ritual, however, when the real work begins. This, the very centrepiece of the Priory programme, is the group therapy session running for nearly 90 minutes every single day, weekends included. It is in these sessions that I start to meet the other members of my group; and it is in these sessions that what I now know to call my ongoing recovery starts to take shape.
In our particular group of 15 alcoholics and addicts we have just one celebrity. The rest of us are a pretty accurate cross-section of Britain, among our ranks being a journalist, a builder, a barrister, a farmer, an estate agent, housewife, a property developer, a yummy mummy, a pilot (thankfully now long retired), a couple of self-employed businessmen, a hairdresser, and, of course, a handful of folk working in IT. We are addicted to cocaine, heroin, sex, skunk, pills, or shopping.
Right now I feel I have nothing in common with them bar our one big common problem. Within just four weeks, they will be like family to me, and - both in the group therapy sessions by day and in the communal lounge area at night - I will be telling them the stuff of my nightmares...
February 2005
London
I am in a hotel somewhere in London. I have come here in the dead of the night because I cannot bear anyone I know to see me like this. Just nine hours ago, around 6pm, I had popped out for a quick pint. That had turned into three, which had obviously turned into the nightly phone call to Trev to get himself round here asap and serve up the necessary. I buy the usual four grams from him just in case I might want some later in the week as tonight I am going to have just a few cheeky lines and be done with it. Somehow, in the next couple of hours, I work my way relentlessly through two whole grams and the nightmare is off and running. By the time I get to the hotel, I am convinced I am being followed and that the entire eyes of the night staff are upon me. I barricade myself in the room, unwrap the final pair, and get stuck in. I need help. I want more coke. I want help. I need more coke. Wanttostopcantstophelpme...
Day 7
The Priory
I have been here a week now and the good news is that I am starting to look and feel physically better than I have done for years. The bad news is that I can't stop crying. Sometimes it is a particularly sad story retold by another member of the group that sets me off. Sometimes it is merely the sight of a squirrel running across the lawn outside. Often it can just be the silence, seemingly endless, that can grip the group in the first few minutes of the daily therapy session.
Each session kicks off in the same way every day. We are split into two groups, one in each room with two members of staff, almost all themselves recovering alcoholics and addicts as well as qualified counsellors. We go around the room introducing ourselves - I'm Danny, I'm an alcoholic and cocaine addict - and are then asked to describe how we are feeling right here and right now. Not how we are thinking or how we were feeling last night or what we may have got up to when off our heads three weeks ago, but how we are feeling right here right now. As in happy, sad, angry, bored, horny, frustrated, guilty, suicidal, sometimes all of the above.
It is here, in these daily sessions, where the essence of the Priory programme comes to life. Without ever being spelt out in any great detail, what gradually becomes apparent is that the more we can be made to feel and get in touch with these feelings and emotions, then the more likely it is that we can start to deal with them in a constructive manner, rather than trying, as of old, to block them out with a bottle of vodka or a bag of coke. Certainly, by the end of my own active addiction, I did not want to feel anything, and would use even the merest hint of an emotion - be it a brief glimpse of happiness or the vague enveloping sense of doom - as an excuse to use. Now, sitting in this room in Priory Lodge, talking with fellow war veterans, I can pinpoint my feelings, talk about them for the first time in years, scream and shout if that's what I need to do, and gradually begin the process of healing.
The other central belief at the heart of the programme - and the one that makes me break down and cry when first expressed to me by a member of staff - is that we are not sinners who are here to somehow miraculously turn into saints in just four weeks' time, but sick people who need to get well. And who have every chance of getting well if we can simply follow this programme while we are here, then take on a few other suggestions for life outside the Priory walls.
The most important of these takes the form of an introduction to the various 12-step fellowships open to anyone seeking recovery, the best-known of which are, of course, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and, in my particular case, Cocaine Anonymous (CA). We are introduced to these fellowships via visiting speakers who come in to tell us their own stories, and the occasional visit outside the walls to the nearest local branch of whichever group it is you most need to go to.
For me, these trips back out into the real world are hard. Every Friday night we are taken in the so-called druggy buggy to the Fulham meeting of Cocaine Anonymous. It starts at 7pm, which means that the route there and back is seemingly lined with social drinkers and recreational drug users all having a perfectly pleasant beginning to their weekends. Not for me, and not for my fellow group members on the bus. We are whisked in and out, back home by 9pm to the big white building in Roehampton, ready for another long and painful weekend in recovery...
September 2005
London
This fine autumn weekend I am meant to be away on a short family visit to Paris, a chance to show the kids the sights, maybe even take them up the Eiffel Tower if there's time. Either way, little Jack and Molly are going to have to do it all without Dad, because Dad isn't with them. Because Dad has failed to make the train one more time, because Dad has been up for three nights on the trot, because Dad is desperate to never ever come down. My wife Jane, now driven beyond the point of caring by way too many examples of such behaviour, instantly sees the all too familiar signs of yet another no-show, sweeps the children up and away, off to Paris without me. I get straight on the phone to Trev, order up another four, and settle in for a long weekend with only my best mate Charlie for company.
For the first few hours, I am flying high, not a care in the world, downing the vodka, snorting the coke. The porn gets more intense, the rush almost unbearable, the desire to never come down forcing me to take more and more. Somewhere, though, deep in my core, in what is left of the old me, the old loving father and husband, I know that this is all wrong. It is utterly unforgivable. That I am going to kill myself, if I do not stop this madness. The problem is that I can't. I want to stop and I can't. I want to stop and I can't. I want to...
Day 10
The Priory
On my first day here someone told me that at some point I would be asked to write my life story, then read it aloud to the group. Today is the day when I am going to stand up in front of my 15 fellow travellers on this extraordinary journey and tell them the truth. Bits have already leaked out in the daily group therapy sessions, over a meal in the canteen, sitting chatting in the communal lounge at night. This though is the real thing, the one that has to begin with the day I was born and finish with the last drink and the last line on that long flight back home from Sydney.
I am nearly halfway through the 28-day programme and already that old world seems a long way away. I have wept every day, but I have also started to laugh again for the first time in years. I no longer feel that I need four large drinks and six fat lines of Charlie to make me at one with the world. I have started to feel the first rumblings of what the Priory staff and the people at AA and CA refer to as a spiritual awakening, my own version of which is that I am beginning to think of people other than me, and of things other than drink and drugs. Even with these encouraging early signs of recovery, though, I know that today is going to be difficult.
I stand up in front of them, Bill, John, the other Danny, Susan my fellow cokehead, Phil, Linda, these people I had never met just two weeks ago, and I start to tell them my story. The years of wanting to block the world out with drink, then drugs, the good times, the awful times, and finally the worst of times, the times when I tried to stop, wanted with all my will to stop, only to find, to my terror, that I couldn't. And how now, through this programme, with their help, with the visits to the fellowships, and with surrendering to a will greater than my own - call it God, call it Buddha, call it Jane or Jack or Molly - I am starting to slowly turn the corner. I break down many times as I tell them all this, tell them stuff I have never told anyone before or since. And by the end, on day 10 of my four-week stay in the Priory, I finally feel that I might just have a chance of once again being able to breathe, to live, and to love...
Day 15
The Priory
Along with my life story, I have one other piece of written work to present to the group before my 28 days are up. This is a written Step One, the introductory and essential beginning to the 12-step programme which underpins the entire process of recovery. In order to do this, I have to write down and read aloud 10 examples of how I had become utterly powerless over my addiction and how my life had become completely unmanageable.
Let me count the ways. I would drive my car while off my head. With my children strapped into the back seat. I would go for days without washing or even brushing my teeth. I would not eat while on a drink and drug binge, then gorge myself to try to alleviate the horrors of the comedown. I would lie about everything to everyone. I would spend £200 a day in order to render myself senseless. And every day I would wake up so determined to never do that again.
And every day, just 30 minutes later, I would be on the phone to Trev or to John, begging them to bring it on just more time. As I read my Step One aloud to the group, the full horror of what I have done and the damage I have caused becomes all too apparent, and I can barely talk or breathe, or make any kind of sense out of what has happened to me. At the end, the group come forward, one by one, and hug me and hold me close. And finally I am gone, my defences utterly smashed, a 45-year-old man broken into pieces, standing here in the Priory and weeping for the havoc he has wreaked, the people he has hurt, and all that he has lost...
October 2005
London
Even in my drug-addled stupor, I realised that not only was I slowly killing myself with my addiction, I was quickly snorting my way through the guts of my entire salary, the hefty overdraft facility set up in happier times, and the entire family savings. This was the money we had both worked so hard to put a way for some far-off rainy day. Now it was pouring out of me at an average of £200 a day, or £1,500 a week, or £6,000 a month, or a staggering £72,000 a year. Every year for nearly five years - over £300,000 in total. This was money we did not have, and money I am paying back to this day, and will be doing so for a long time to come. The shame of seeing good old Trev driving around in his nice new car at the same time as Jane found herself unable to do the weekly shop - 'it must be those wankers at the bank, darling' - haunts me still.
Day 20
The Priory
The days since telling my life story have passed in what is by now the familiar routine of daily life inside the Priory walls: breakfast, meditation, group therapy, life story, lunch. Then the afternoon sessions of perhaps some 12-step work, a talk from a visiting ex-patient, a trip out to a CA meeting, a spot of yoga, or, my own personal unlikely favourite, a one-hour session of group movement therapy. Somewhere between dance and mime, these sessions take place in a large barn at the edge of the main building, and involve the group acting out a number of feelings to the accompaniment of music and instructions from our resident coach.
Yes, I know it all sounds a bit daft and New Age Gone Mad. Today though, as I start my final week and have my farewell session in the barn, it all seems to make perfect sense. The group are asked to express in dance how they feel about me as a group member as I prepare to take my leave of them. As one, they form a circle around me, hands reaching out towards me, keeping me safe from my demons, while bidding me a fond farewell. I look up to try to say thank you and goodbye to each and every one of them, but no words will come out, and I can see nothing but tears.
By now, nearing the end of my stay, I have had two visits from my wife, Jane. I had made contact with her through the hospital authorities in my first week here simply to let her know that I am here and that I am trying to get myself well again. Not surprisingly, she is deeply sceptical of such promises, having heard them all just one too many times before.
At the end of my first fortnight inside, however, she finally agrees to come and see me. I can see her still, one year on, as she pulls up in the car and waves over to me. She gets out and walks across the car park towards me. I run towards her and bury myself in her arms, my silent sobs taking the place of the script I had carefully prepared for this moment.
Over the course of this visit and her second trip a week later, we agree that I will move into a rented apartment on my own when I get out of here. That I will attend AA, NA, and CA on a daily basis. That I will get to see Molly and Jack at weekends for as long I stay clean and sober. And that I will not see any of them again if I ever go back out there, back out there into the madness...
Day 26
The Priory
Two days to go, and as one of the veterans of the party by this stage, I have been elected group leader. This involves little more than welcoming newcomers and making sure that everyone is on board the druggy buggy in good time, but right now it means the world to me. In years gone by, I have been appointed to various bodies and been promoted many times at work, but that was all before the slow inexorable decline into alcohol and cocaine addiction, and in turn, the inability to ever be anywhere near the right place at the right time. Now, at last, a group of people - and I don't care that they happen to be a bunch of slowly recovering drunks and junkies - have decided that I can be trusted to show up again.
These final few days as leader pass quietly enough, bar the thrilling rumour that sweeps the camp to the effect that a major-league pop star is due to join us any day now. As group leader, I will have to meet and greet one of my teenage idols, take him to his room, and, best of all, discipline him if and when he is late for class. Luckily, for both of us, he never shows up. Disappointed at the time, I am glad now that he never made it through the door. I liked our group just the way it was. I liked the fact that we had just the one celebrity among our team of civilians. And I liked the fact that now, our 28 days nearly up, we were about to head back out there into the real world, bound for ever with our memories of the Priory and our pledges to stay in touch and to never ever go back out there again...
Easter 2007
London
It didn't quite work out like that of course. Of the 15 people in my group at the Priory, I have not heard from a third of them since the day I walked back out through reception. They may be well, they may be back drinking and drugging, and I pray for the former while fearing the worst. Another five have been what is known in AA parlance as in-and-out, making their own way through the revolving doors of the fellowships and recovery a few months and weeks at a time. And a final third, a hardcore five, have, to the best of my knowledge, stayed clean and sober since the day we left, though if my own experience is anything to go by, it will not have been an easy road to travel.
Some days I look back at my four weeks in the Priory and wonder why it is that we all haven't made it through to the other side. On other days I am frankly amazed that I have made it this far without having to have a drink and a drug. Before I went in there, after all, I could not get through a single morning without one or the other. To last more than 365 days without either is a miracle, though one in which I claim little or no part. I have simply done what was suggested to me in Roehampton and in the various church hall fellowship meetings I have been to in the 12 months since leaving. Namely, to get myself a sponsor (someone who is successfully working a 12-step programme and who has got some clean time under his belt), to work the 12 steps on a daily basis, and to get myself to meetings as often as I can. And to not pick up a drink or a drug, just for today. Tomorrow? I might well get wasted. Today, though, today I'll pass, thanks.
Now, more than a year on, I am back at home, back with Jane and Jack and Molly, back trying to make the most of it second time around. I am only too aware that I can never fully make up for the harm I caused to them and to myself and to everyone around me in the years of my active alcoholism and addiction. All I can do, therefore, is what I am told to do at every meeting I go to, which is to lead this new life of recovery one day at a time, to never go back out there, and to practise the 12 steps in everything I do. Perhaps, one day in the future, the scars will heal, but for now just to be here is so much more than enough.
And now, when I tell people about my time in the Priory, they invariably ask me two questions. One is did I meet lots of celebrities. The second is do you think that I need to go there. To which the answers I give are no, and it's not really for me to say. All I know is that if you ever find yourself drinking and/or taking drugs and not being able to stop, no matter how hard you try, no matter how hideous the consequences for you and the people around you, then you could do a lot worse than think about a brief spell in one of the many Priories or similar private and NHS treatment centres dotted around the UK. You probably won't get to meet Kate Moss. But it might just save your life.
· Danny Wilson works in publishing and is a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict. All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of all concerned
