'BEEN THERE, DONE THAT'

He's The Top Lawyer For Area Addicts In Trouble With The Law. But
Don't Try To Snow Him ... As A Recovering Alcoholic, He Has Struggled
With His Own Demon Of Addiction For Most Of His Life

The crack cocaine addict is shackled when she is brought in to meet
defence lawyer Gerry White deep in the bowels of the Ottawa
courthouse on an early spring morning. Mr. White is flipping through
his client's thick file when a prison guard leads her into the small
room divided by a sheet of smashproof glass.

Considering she has been jailed for a week, the 27-year-old,
ponytailed woman seems chipper, if a little desperate. She wants Mr.
White to get her out on bail -- today if possible. She is facing a
string of charges, including possession of crack, failure to appear
and, most recently, theft for stealing a chocolate bar and some
women's underwear from a Giant Tiger.

It's not an unusual case for the crisply-suited, 61-year-old lawyer,
and it's with a veteran's touch that he asks if she has ever gone
through rehab. He listens carefully as she describes how life was
great when she got clean for six months. Then she relapsed.

"And were you going to meetings?" Mr. White asks.

No.

"Always trying to take the easy way out, aren't you?" Mr. White says,
eyebrows furled. He makes it sound like a joke, but he's steadfast
about one thing: if the woman wants his help and wants to stay off
drugs, she needs to attend meetings.

Mr. White should know -- the Chelsea-raised lawyer is a recovering
alcoholic. He wears his disease like a badge of pride in the Ottawa
courthouse's pristine white hallways, where he's widely regarded as
the leading lawyer for criminals with addictions. Mr. White has never
tried to hide his alcoholism. He talks openly about the addiction
that has often defined both his personal and professional life.

As the go-to man for addiction cases at the Ottawa courthouse, his
advice is regularly sought by other lawyers and even judges. And
there's no shortage of cases. Officially, 75 to 80 per cent of people
in prison are there due to alcohol or drug related crimes, according
to Correctional Services Canada and the Elizabeth Fry Society. Mr.
White thinks that's an underestimate. He handles about 100 clients,
almost all addicted to alcohol or drugs.

Despite the lawyerly suits, Mr. White has dishevelled grey hair, a
deeply creased forehead and, more often than not, a Cameo cigarette
at his lips. He good-naturedly grills his clients -- and his friends
- -- about the trouble they've gotten into. He would fit in well at a
dark English pub if he hadn't stopped drinking 29 years ago.

"I think I was an alcoholic from the outset," he says, over coffee at
the courthouse cafeteria, shortly after handing $5 to a client for a
pack of cigarettes. "It's like those potatoes that you add water and
they become mashed potatoes. As soon as I had the alcohol, I was an
alcoholic. I loved it."

Mr. White was 13 years old the first time he got drunk. At that time,
in 1958, he was living in Chelsea, Que., the second youngest of nine
children of an English father and Quebecoise mother. Chelsea was dry
in the 1950s. You had to drive 10 minutes to Wakefield or Hull for
beer. The suicide rate in his little town soared during that time,
Mr. White says.

When he moved to Ottawa to attend university, Mr. White was a typical
college binge drinker. The English literature and law student missed
classes and even exams due to hangovers, and his transcript was
spotty. By 1970, he had dropped out of school, got married and
continued to drink.

The tavern at the Beacon Arms Hotel on Albert Street was Mr. White's
pub of choice. Beer was his favourite drink. "When I got into liquor
I went wacky, just crazy," he says; he even landed in jail for
impaired driving a couple of times during those years. Despite his
boozy nights, Mr. White always held a job and never became part of
the street crowd that would one day deeply influence his life. He got
into the parking lot business and managed several lots in downtown Ottawa.

In the "last five years" before he sobered up, Mr. White was a daily
drinker. The cycle was painful and predictable: wake up hungover;
drink beer to stem the headache; hit the Beacon for another round;
drink more. Repeat.

"I wouldn't have hung around me," he says about himself at that time.
His only friends were the men at the Beacon and his first marriage
eventually crumbled, in part due to his alcoholism. "I didn't want to
hang around people who didn't drink," Mr. White remembers.

It's a Thursday night in March and Mr. White meets an old friend at
Dunn's on Elgin Street where he's a regular who jives the waitresses
and doesn't look at the menu before ordering. After a day in court,
this is his downtime. After dinner, the men grab a taxi to
Southminster United Church for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that
Mr. White views as much as a social event as part of his ongoing recovery.

A small crowd is gathered outside the Aylmer Avenue church and Mr.
White is quickly cornered by a scruffy, middle-aged man. Clients
often show up at these meetings, sometimes as mandated by their
sentences. The lawyer seems to hold court just as easily here as downtown.

When everyone has gathered in an upstairs room of the church, a
middle-aged man kicks things off with a well-known greeting: "Hi, my
name is Bob and I'm an alcoholic."

Twenty-nine years ago, Mr. White came to this church to borrow $50
from a friend; he ended up staying for the meeting. His rehab story
has become somewhat of a legend now, easily told by a group of men
who have bonded over their disease throughout years of recovery.

"He started telling me that he didn't have a problem," remembers Bill
Hayden, who was 16 years sober when he met Mr. White at the church's
door. "But I said that that's the amount that I used to drink." The
two men immediately clicked and the AA veteran convinced Mr. White to stay.

The next morning Mr. White was en route to a bar in Hull when he
called his new friend. Mr. Hayden offered to pick him up and soon Mr.
White found himself being driven throughout the Ottawa area, his
driver always promising to stop in the next town for a beer.

Mr. White, ill in the passenger seat after almost 24 hours without
drinking, figured Mr. Hayden would have to let him out somewhere. He
was wrong. Around dinner time, another man accosted their car at Bank
and Somerset streets. "Is this the pigeon?" he asked, cornering Mr.
White. The man then escorted him to his second AA meeting.

"In all of my time around, I don't think I've seen anyone who fought
recovery less than Gerry did," says Mr. Hayden, a retiree living in
Brockville who spent almost two decades managing a men's and women's
recovery home there.

In almost three decades, Mr. White has never relapsed. His worst
nightmares were those when he dreamt that he'd slipped up and had a
drink. Mr. White acknowledges that he is one of the lucky ones when
it comes to recovery; he had a strong support network that kept after
him to attend meetings. But he also explains his recovery in more
philosophical terms, "I think we're all put on this world with a
quota on things and I'd had my quota."

Today, Mr. White's focus is criminals with substance abuse problems.
He says he is "one of them" and understands the cycles of relapse
that are part of recovery, even if he never experienced them himself.
He gets frustrated when clients slip up -- "I give them hell. I say
certain things that maybe I shouldn't" -- but always gives them a
second, third or even fourth chance.

Mr. White has little interest in working with people who aren't
users; he calls non-addicts in the criminal justice system "the real
criminals." When asked if those victimized by crimes commited by
addicts might object to this statement, he says, "If they want to
debate it, tell them to come down here for a few days."

If alcoholism and addiction are complex diseases, Mr. White believes
they should be treated with simple strategies that involve stopping
cold. Harm reduction programs -- where addicts are weaned off their
drug of choice or provided with clean needles to inject drugs -- are
akin to assisted suicide, he says: "It's like giving a potential
armed robber a gun."

According to the defence lawyer, there's no need for new recovery
approaches and those who claim that AA doesn't work simply aren't
committed to following the program.

"In my view, there's only one way to recover and that's to come
clean," he says. "The program of recovery is 60 years old and all I
had to do was follow it."

It's perhaps tough talk about recovery, but it's matched by years
spent with tough cases. Three years after Mr. White attended that
first meeting at Southminster United Church, he met a former street
thug named Billy Buffett who had cleaned up and started a recovery
house in Vanier. The two became fast friends and when Mr. Buffett
died in 1983, Mr. White became full-time director of Billy's House of Welcome.

While running the recovery home, Mr. White connected with other
substance abuse counsellors and programs around the province. He
still plugs into those contacts today, jostling for bed space for his clients.

It wasn't long before Mr. White again crossed the junction where the
law and substance abusers commonly meet. In 1988, he brought one of
his House of Welcome residents to court for sentencing. The judge
refused to recognize the client's six months in rehab and gave him a
full four years in jail. In contrast, inmates who await sentencing in
prison get that time knocked off their sentences.

"I was livid," remembers Mr. White about the defence lawyer who did
little to fight for his client's freedom.

Disgusted, he told his second wife, Suzanne, he would become a lawyer
to represent such clients himself. He applied to the University of
Ottawa and while Suzanne worked full-time, he slugged his way through
law school. Almost 20 years after he left Carleton University, Mr.
White graduated with his law degree in 1995.

In the courthouse, Mr. White is known for

his "encyclopedic knowledge" about substance abuse programs, says
Mark Ertel, president of the Defence Counsel Association of Ottawa.
"He's the guy to go to when you want answers to these questions about
addiction problems."

Over the years, Mr. White has handled some nasty clients, including
alleged murderers and kidnappers. He's seen the addicts get younger
- -- the old-school alcoholics are dying while the new generation of
addicts is often hooked on cocaine and heroin. For the most part, Mr.
White prefers not to take on female clients ("I can't be as crude")
and doesn't handle drunk drivers, saying he'll leave them for
specialist lawyers.

Mr. White claims he'll give clients second chances, but will "fire
them" if they don't attempt to attend self-help groups. He often
requests that judges order them to attend his meetings at
Southminster United. "It's probably not enforceable, but the bozos
don't know that," he says, using a term he also applies to some judges.

Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. White has sounded off repeatedly about
Ottawa's new drug treatment court, which allows addicts who commit
non-violent crimes to receive treatment and close monitoring rather
than jail time.

The court, which opened to much media fanfare in March, isn't open to
alcoholics. "Alcohol, one of the most prevalent and addictive drugs,
is not on the criteria?" Mr. White asks, his voice rising slightly.
Alcohol was even served to those attending a reception marking the
court's opening, which infuriates this recovering alcoholic.

Mr. White also objects to the court's bail supervision plan, which
requires many participants to report to a judge and a local addiction
recovery centre once a week. He insists that isn't enough and he
continues to steadfastedly oppose the court.

"I'm not going to send my clients there," Mr. White later sniffs.

In 1999, Mr. White defended the same kind of case that prompted him
to become a lawyer in the first place. His client had been sentenced
to seven years for trafficking drugs, but the judge refused to deduct
nine months from his sentence for time he spent in rehab. Mr. White
took the case to the Court of Appeals -- and won.

Mr. Ertel of the Defence Counsel Association of Ottawa says the case
is now used as a precedent around the province.