by Mat Capper
Tell me what you seen
Was it a dream?
Was I in it?
Life seems so obscene
Until it's over
Who knows?
For most people putting their hands into a fire would result in not repeating that same behaviour. For me I couldn’t help but keep getting burnt. My fire was alcohol.
I’m a well educated man, whatever that means. I attended grammar School on the so called posh side of the river Mersey (Liverpool). I studied Law at university and was destined to be the first in my family to become a Barrister (not that I wanted to, I wanted to be an actor). From my first experience with Alcohol I knew there was some sort of magic in the bottle.
I was 7 years old when I first tasted a substance I later found out to be gin. It tasted how I imagined perfume to taste, yet the effect was magic. For the first time in my life I felt the warm glow of acceptance and invincibility. Now maybe we all experience this magic with our first drink, but for me I knew this was to be a long acquaintance.
All I want is someone who can fill the hole
In the life I know
In between life and death
When there's nothing left
Do you wanna know?
Drinking in my early teens was always a problem. I could never help but to be the one who was always carried home, always sick, and always passed out. When I went to university this was to be a familiar pattern. To be honest, I had a whale of a time in the first year; lots of parties, sex, drugs and the illusion (or delusion) that I was Liam Gallagher. I attended three hours of tutorials in my first year and still passed all my exams.
During my second year of ‘studies’ I remained drunk for most of the time. The person I was started to disintegrate. An inner loneliness crept in, and I became totally dependent on alcohol. It was during this time that I could easily drink upwards of two bottles of vodka or six bottles of red wine daily.
I started to experience black outs when drunk. Now this isn’t passing out from the effects, but the opposite. I was functioning in a drunken stupor. I woke up in a hotel in Jersey once. Not as part of a holiday, but on my own with absolutely no recollection of how I’d got there, which meant I’d boarded a plane, got a taxi, booked in, drank more booze etc etc.
You come in on your own
And you leave on your own
Forget the lovers you've know
And your friends on your own
The change over in my drinking happened when I went through a windscreen of a car when I was a passenger with a drunk mate. Now, to this day I have no idea of how the accident occurred. It was quite common for me, at the time, to climb out of car windows are surf the roof whilst going down country roads. Another trick was to turn lights off whilst night driving. In the accident I’d broken my jaw in five places and badly damaged a knee and hip. I also needed about 70 stitches. This would normally cause a sane or moderate drinker to re-evaluate their intake, but not me. I went from being dependent to desperate. I couldn’t go more than half an hour without drink and took to carrying a hip flask of whiskey round with me.
I still had this vague poetic image that I was some sort of tortured genius or Burroughs type character, but the reality was that I’d become a hopeless drunk. I was lonely, desperate, terrified and totally isolated. I refer to this period as my ‘bed-sit land’ phase. I’d reached a point where my family had given up, I couldn’t work, mix with people, eat food, sleep or wash. Tennants super was my only source of escape.
All I want is someone
Who can fill the hole
In the life I know
In between life and death
When there's nothing left
Do you want to know?
For most people, maybe they would seek help from professionals to address the problem, but for me this was impossibility. I’d have rather been diagnosed as Schizophrenic than have to give up the bottle. It had become my master and best friend.
It was during this time that I started to experience the Delirium Tremens (DT’s). These were not the shakes and sickness of old but a new torture of the mental variety. I could no longer drink permanently; my body would quickly become poisoned. I tended to drink for about seven or eight days in a row and then detox myself. For the first thirty six hours of the detox I’d be rolling round in agony, hallucinating.
Alcohol depletes the body of Thiamine which regulates the nervous system. This is what causes the shakes in people. The more extreme drinkers experience fits and spasms coupled with hallucinations. I wasn’t ever informed of this in any ‘drugs’ education class.
The worst set of DT’s I suffered still scars me to this day. I was trying to close my eyes in my mum’s spare bedroom, (I always returned to my poor mums to detox). The spasms and fits had set in, and the Librium I had been prescribed was yet to start working. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing things and feeling like my heart was going to explode. I had become unaware of whether I was awake or asleep. I was seeing people attacking me with knives and spiders crawling up my arms and legs. To this day I can glamorise this as some sort of great LSD trip, but it wasn’t, it was hell on earth. I didn’t for one moment expect to survive the night, and if I’d have had a gun I’m pretty sure I’d have blown my brains out. The long night was punctuated with me screaming and my mother running in to check on me.
I managed to survive these DT’s, and everyone thought yet again that me and the bottle were finished. This was not the case. For some reason after just a few days of drinking my mind would tell me I would be okay hitting it again. The sadness I felt in between drinks was often as bad as the drinking itself.
My last drink began on the 27/10/1998. I’d been off it for about three weeks and a friend of mine, who I hadn’t seen for years visited with a spare ticket to see John Martin. Before I knew it I was stood with a drink in my hand kidding myself I would be okay. This drink lasted for 10 days.
You come in on your own
And you leave on your own
Forget the lovers you've know
And your friends on your own.
I still to this day recall the last drink I took. It started in the morning with eight cans of Stella Artois and half a bottle of vodka, I drank eight pints of cider in a small pub called slaters in Liverpool’s city centre, and finished off with three bottles of red wine. I’m not showing off, today I find it quite sad. I got absolutely no affect off the alcohol and I knew the game was up. The last bottle of wine was washed down with numerous drugs including Seroxat, Paracetamol, Diazepam and Beta Blockers. I put a song on repeat called ‘On your own’ by Richard Ashcroft (verve) and I can remember being resigned to drifting off into another world.
Lies
I've got to get rid of this hole inside
Lies
I've got to get rid of this hole inside
I'm coming in on my own
I'm coming in on my own
I'm coming in on my own
Lies
I've got to get rid of this hole inside
Lies
I've got to get rid of this hole inside
Lies
I've got to get rid of this hole inside…
I described last month ("My Name is Tim") waking up from this stupor covered in sick and alive with the song still playing. The date was October 6th 1998 and I haven’t drunk alcohol since. All I know is that I had a desire to live. The candle inside me seemed to be alight once again. What I experienced must have been some sort of rock bottom followed by an awakening of sorts. I had become totally convinced that I could no longer drink, albeit many years after everyone around me had been convinced.
This is why it is often futile trying to treat alcohol and drug dependency because any service or form of treatment cannot give any individual the desire to stay stopped. We may be able to keep people sober and free from drugs for limited periods of time, or address ‘issues’ from peoples past, but without desire they will inevitably return to substances. People who can recognise problems within themselves and change them should be grateful not to be one of the thousands I have encountered in my years working in treatment.
Alcohol would never be introduced into today’s society. It is responsible for ten times the number of deaths of all other drugs put together. The national treatment agency (UK government appointed) has recently published a report stating that alcohol is responsible for 70% of all hospital admissions, 360 000 incidents of domestic violence in the UK each year, and 1.2 million violent crimes each year. It’s the acceptability of alcohol that is a problem. It’s so sad that generation after generation get into drugs, and alcohol should be included in that. Smoking is now pretty unacceptable yet we put up with drink and all the anti-social and violent behaviour that comes with it. Just imagine the healthy anarchy without it. Imagine the tabloid press reporting the threat of alcohol as if it were a new drug.
The world health organisation recognises Alcoholism and the third biggest killer in the world. Above it are heart disease and cancer, both of which alcohol contributes to. In the UK in 2004 67 people died from Heroin overdose, Alcohol contributed to 250 000 deaths (NHS figures).
Of course I have a personal angle for my anti-alcohol stance and of course I accept that for the majority it’s a pleasant pastime. I just feel the world would be a better place without it. When I walk through any city centre during the night I can see hundreds of potential revolutionaries all anaesthetised by a very powerful drug. Their lives distracted from what is being forced on us by the plutocrats running the world. Imagine if we could all see the reality of how we are living, of how governments can murder 650 000 innocent people for oil, of how many hundreds of thousands are still treated as slaves and die because of lack of food and medicine. Then maybe there would be revolution instead of obsession with money, prestige and escape. Who knows maybe one day, or maybe I’m just very naïve. . . . .but I think not.