DRUGS, MORE DRUGS AND BURCHILL

Drugs, drugs and more drugs. We newspapers crave them constantly. We
are desperate for them. We cannot get enough of them. We are addicts.
And we find ourselves in a spiral of addiction. Tabloid drug stories
lead to broadsheet drug stories. It is a slippery slope. And we cannot
resist sliding down it, try as we may.

The latest drug craze to have swept the media is the Danniella
Westbrook septum story. Pictures of the soap opera actress, who had
destroyed her nose snorting cocaine, were first published by The Mail
on Sunday, and the story proved to deliver an instant hit. Soon
everybody wanted a piece of the action, and the rest of the tabloids
jostled all Sunday to be cut in on the deal. By Monday the broadsheets
were beginning to succumb to the irresistible lure of the splash. In
discussions on Monday for my regular Tuesday column, my editor and I
flirted briefly with having some of it. It was hard to say no, but I
did. It would not, my editor and I agreed, be feasible to run such a
story without reprinting the photograph of Ms Westbrook's missing
septum. Considering it no longer appears to exist, it has already had
quite enough exposure.

It wasn't easy to walk away, though. There is so much to say about
the drug, and about all drugs. And I'm arrogant enough to believe that
I have important things to say about such matters. In this belief I am
far from alone. We columnists all know that there is plenty to say
about cocaine. For we have said it all before - when Dallaglio was
honey-trapped, when Palmer-Tomkinson went into rehab, when the young
Parker Bowles was rumbled. The list goes on and on.

But when I went into my local newsagent the next day, I noted that
other broadsheets had not had the strength of will to resist. The
Guardian had gone the whole hog, offering its readers the oft-repeated
experience of Julie Burchill on cocaine. I know about that, having
taken a couple of lines of coke with her myself. I couldn't bear the
thought of having the picture I knew would accompany the article in
the house.

Late on Tuesday night, though, a distraught friend who has lost a
family member to alcohol and drug abuse telephoned. He was upset by
the article, which he explained had defended the use of cocaine. It
had been headlined, "You're gonna die so you might as well live". It
seems that he was not the only one. In yesterday morning's Guardian,
the letters page led with eight negative comments from readers. One
was from a casualty officer in an inner-city hospital. "How are we
going to tackle real problems if they are minimised and made
acceptable?" he asked. Another was much funnier. "There is some
low-grade 'Julie' being touted around certain sections of this paper.
It may give the appearance of top-quality stuff, but a quick 'toot'
confirms this 'Julie' has been cut with some hoary old cliches and a
fair quantity of filler."

It was all too much for The Independent and for me. The telephone
rang yesterday morning, and there was the editor of this newspaper,
Simon Kelner, on the line (as they say). "Did you see Julie Burchill's
piece in The Guardian yesterday? And the letters page today? I'd like
you to write about it for tomorrow's paper." Damn! I'd been so good.
I'd resisted writing a story; I'd resisted reading a story. But now I
was going to do both. I'd held out for only 48 hours.

At this point it is only fair that I should declare the first of
several personal interests in this story as it has developed. Far from
being a despiser of Ms Burchill and her works, I hired her as a
columnist at The Guardian, during many happy years as editor of the
Weekend section. I'm afraid, as well, that when I read the story, I
found it to be useful and astute on several points. Ms Burchill says:
"Let us not forget that cocaine is first and foremost an anaesthetic,
and therefore particularly handy for medicating the tricky condition
called human."

But while an insight like this one might suggest that Ms Burchill
understands the degree of unhappiness and mental turmoil under which
Ms Westbrook must have been labouring to become so terribly and
self-destructively addicted to cocaine, she instead retreats from this
position. Ms Burchill is sometimes sentimental, but only about matters
with which she identifies. She does not identify herself as a cocaine
addict, so she has no pity for Ms Westbrook. "Anyway, Danniella's only
young still, and she's got a rich boyfriend; without meaning to be
callous, she can always have a new bit stuck on." If only the mental,
spiritual and physical illness which has brought Ms Westbrook so low
could really be fixed so easily. Such declarations make it clear that
Ms Burchill does not understand addiction at all.

Some might suggest that she is in denial herself. I don't know her
well enough to judge, but I do know that she is not being completely
frank about her own drug use. She gives the impression that she took
cocaine only for a decade in the Eighties and early Nineties, when she
was "queen of the Groucho Club", before changing her life after moving
to Brighton. But The Guardian itself reprinted an interview with her,
by Fiachra Gibbons, now The Guardian's arts correspondent, which first
appeared in the magazine The Printer's Devil. Ms Burchill snorted
cocaine during the interview, which took place in Brighton.

It is time now to declare another interest. My husband is a
recovering drug addict and alcoholic, and one who has, like Ms
Westbrook, had his addiction luridly revealed in the media. He
interviewed Julie last year, clean and sober. Ms Burchill was using
drugs then and invited Will to visit her when he'd given up giving
up.

But my husband can never "give up giving up", and the fact that Ms
Burchill does not understand that is testament to the fact that she
simply does not understand drug problems such as those of Danniella
Westbrook and Will Self. Ms Burchill has used drugs, but as she says
herself, she has, throughout her drug use, functioned. That is not the
case with Ms Westbrook nor with my husband. Drug use has brought them
to the depths of despair, and to the brink of death.

In the end it is as simple as a peanut allergy. Some people cannot
touch them, or they will die. For the rest of us, it's not such a
problem. Obviously, the level of addictiveness of the substance plays
a part, which is why heroin is the most dangerous drug of all.

That is the trouble with our coverage of drugs, and with our "war" on
them. It does not reflect the duality of the drug situation. In
Tuesday's Guardian, words written by a drug user were illustrated with
pictures of a drug addict. There is truth in both positions, but they
are polarised positions. That is why it does not help in drug
education to tell young people that drugs are always dangerous. These
people see others for whom drug use is not a problem and believe they
are being told a lie. While it is not a lie, it is not the truth, either.

So there it is: I've written my piece, and I've had my piece of Ms
Westbrook's terrible, frightening illness. Drug addiction is like a
possession and responds to no logic but the inner logic of the human
soul and its anaesthetised, dying will to survive.

God knows whether Ms Westbrook will find the strength to overcome her
vile debilitation. But I am certain of one thing.

The media circus around her will hinder her progress, not help it.
And everybody who has gazed in transfixed repulsion at the drug
pornography that is the picture of her wasted face is a part of that.