HARRY’S HISTORY ABOUT ADDICTS AND ALCOHOLISM
Harry is a forty-six-year-old magazine columnist. He is at the top of his profession, well known not just in this country but in the United States too. He is divorced with two young children whom he sees regularly. A very talented man, he managed to continue his writing throughout his time as an addict. Perhaps the only sign that things weren't quite right was that he would write for money things that he did not believe in. Yet, for all the drugs he was taking, the quality of his work was still competent. He was making a great deal of money and never had any shortage of freelance work from magazines and newspapers both in Britain and in the United States.
For Harry, addiction started with alcohol. He was a heavy drinker from the word go, and as a student occasionally took amphetamines.
'I was introduced to marijuana in New York by a black writer, and I thought it was really heavy. To get it, we had to go down to Greenwich Village and knock three times and ask for Charlie.'
His career began to suffer from his drinking. Harry married another drinker and they would have fierce rows, culminating in his beating her up. Divorce followed. Then, around the late 1960s, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and gave up alcohol altogether.
But Harry didn't give up marijuana, despite AA's recommendation that members should avoid all mood-altering drugs. 'In my back pocket, so to speak, I had drugs. I had hashish, LSD, Mandrax and Tuinal on which I once OD'd. I thought the AAs were too simple-minded to know about this.'
In the next thirteen years cannabis became more and more important to him. 'I lived virtually constantly on hashish. I'd roll a joint first thing when I woke up in the morning. I'd smoke it all day and all night, and the only anxiety I ever had was when I ran out of it!'
He was still getting good journalistic work, but more and more his life was given over to smoking cannabis. He married again and had two children.
'One of the saddest things about my whole hashish time was the inability to play with my children, because I actually really did love those babies. But I couldn't get out of my head-trip to play with them.
'My life became really inward-looking, self-feeding and feeding an imagination which went round and round in circles. I wanted to write novels, I wanted to write poetry, I wanted to write books. I wanted to express myself like crazy but I couldn't because I was stuck in this hash habit. It had me completely in thrall.'
Harry's last few days on drugs were spent in Miami, where he was researching a series of articles for an American magazine. Ironically, he was still going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. 'I arrived in Miami and I called AA, and then I called the guy with the drugs and I scored a lot of drugs. I finished up in a hotel room in Miami with a lot of Columbian flower heads grass which is very trippy and very strong, and also something masquerading as cocaine, which I suspect was sulphate, and something masquerading as mescaline, which I also suspect was sulphate. I sat in the hotel room fantasising and watching all-night colour TV and getting high and stoned.'
The following day Harry went to an AA meeting and for the first time heard someone claiming to be 'an addict and an alcoholic'. Yet for a couple more days and nights he locked himself in his hotel room, fantasising and taking drugs. 'In the middle of the night I got into awful despair, and I prayed, and I think I meant it.'
A girl he had met through AA rang him the next day, and asked him if he was coming to another AA meeting. 'I can't because I've got a drug problem' was Harry's reply. The words just seemed to pop out of his mouth, despite himself. It was the first time he had admitted it to anybody.
The girl laughed. 'That's fine,' she said. 'Can you get through the lobby?'
Harry burst into tears. 'I don't think anybody but another addict would have asked that question. Because nobody but an addict knows how paranoid you can get in a hotel room. You can be on the street or in the room, but you cannot get through the lobby because the guy on the desk will know.'
Harry flushed all his drugs down the toilet. He had a bath. And that night he went to his first meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. When he realised where he was being taken, he objected at first, saying he wasn't into narcotics. The NA members who had come to fetch him asked: 'What have you been using?'
He said: 'Well, only . . .'
And they all chorused: 'Marijuana and cocaine, right?' They asked him how long he had been using them, and for the first time Harry counted up the years. They came to thirteen. 'Thirteen years constitutes a habit, right?' they said to him.
‘I think it was the proudest time in my life, because I felt that I really belonged with the kind of heavy dudes I always wanted to belong to. I had been overwhelmed with the feeling that I wasn't a drug addict because I was only a hash addict and not a heroin addict.'
Back in London there were no Narcotics Anonymous meetings like there are now. Harry went back to Alcoholics Anonymous, and every time he spoke he described himself as an 'alcoholic and an addict'. Slowly, other AA members who had had a problem with drugs as well as with drink heard about him and got in touch. A year later, in 1979, they formed the first Narcotics Anonymous meeting in London.
But Harry's first year off drugs was a difficult one. He had returned home to London to find that his second wife had fallen in love with somebody else. He realised, too, that he didn't love her.
'My first major problem was how to relieve myself of my family with the least pain to the children and to their mother. The work I did on that separation was the only work I'd ever put into a relationship in my life, and the day that I sat at Julia's wedding to the man who is now stepfather to my kids was the first time I had ever felt like a man. A grown-up man.'
That was some time ago. Harry has now been off drugs for seven years. Most people never knew he was on them in the first place, but his colleagues notice that his writing is better. He has written and had published the novel he used just to talk about.
Sometimes he hears people talking about cannabis as if it isn't a drug that can make people into addicts. 'If anybody thinks you cannot be addicted to hashish, they've got another think coming,' is all he says.
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