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Fin Review Article >
Article by Michael Short published in the Australian Financial Review 19/6/2004.
Part 1. Professionals and drug dependence
``If I didn’t stop, I was going to die,’’ says Jane, who used to fly high, in more than just professional terms, in the fashion industry. ``Cocaine is huge, particularly in Sydney. I have found it in every business - from fashion and music to law and order, the medical profession and especially the money markets.’’
For Nicholas, a finance executive leading dozens of staff in a retro-chic office in Melbourne’s corporate heartland, Collins Street, the problem was marijuana. ``I’d be so totally stoned every night that I’d wake up each morning and literally sob with despair at the thought of making it to work, let alone actually doing my job. I loathed myself - couldn’t even look in the mirror - and I was in an agony of shame.’’
John’s addiction is alcohol. ``I just thought blackouts were a normal part of drinking,’’ says the former Melbourne stockbroker. ``Alcohol is so very much a part of the financial markets culture. I couldn’t get out of bed some mornings. Other days, I’d be dry retching in the toilets at lunchtime. But no-one ever knew.’’
Nigel, too, managed to keep his habit secret. A high-profile member of Melbourne’s cultural elite, he spent 10 years addicted to heroin. ``I would have a drop-off once a week of pure, pink-rock heroin. After some time, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without it.’’
Corporate Australia is waking up every day with a hangover from booze, dope, coke, speed, ecstasy and heroin.
Given the shame, stigma and evident risks of confessing to a drug problem, it’s difficult to calibrate just how many tens of thousands of people are suffering like Jane, Nicholas, John and Nigel were.
But we can get some idea. A survey of more than 10,000 households a few years ago by the Commonwealth Department of Health found one in 13 adults had a ``substance-use disorder’’. For people aged between 18 and 24, the rate was as high as one in six.
The detritus of addiction in the lanes behind Collins Street is well known and much lamented. Syringes and bottles litter cobblestones. Homeless, displaced and all-but destroyed people shiver in doorways in all seasons. But substance abuse is happening, too, throughout the shining citadels on Collins Street. It’s rife in the towers of Sydney. It’s everywhere. It’s blind to education and social strata.
``When I was working in Collins Street, people would quietly confide in me that they had an addiction,’’ says Tim Costello, who recently left his pastoral role at the Baptist church on Collins Street to become the head of World Vision in Australia. ``I saw so many executives. I’d tell them: `You are not alone. There are so many successful businesspeople with this type of problem, and you can solve it.’
‘’Solving it is an heroic melange of determination and discipline, of redemption and resurrection. Addiction is a progressive illness. Not solving it eventually leads to self-destruction – and dreadful pain for the family, friends and colleagues of addicts.
``It was devastating for my family,’’ says Nigel, the former heroin addict.
``When I got involved, it was a very social thing to do. Everyone was doing it, but three of us took it to the next step. One died of an overdose, I gave up and one went to gaol.’’
Someone behind bars right now is former celebrity Melbourne lawyer Andrew Fraser, a man who represented Alan Bond for several years. In December 2001 he was sentenced to seven years’ for trafficking and possession of cocaine, and being knowingly concerned in the importation of 5.5 kilograms of the drug.
Fraser was part of a fast-moving group of about 20, primarily from the legal world. Secretly, they called themselves the Negroni Commission (after the cocktail). Cocaine was central to their social world – until Fraser’s downfall scared many of them sufficiently to stride away from the Bolivian marching powder. A number of those people are now QCs and even judges.
The Fraser fraternity may have stopped shoving hundreds of thousands of dollars up their snouts, but cocaine is as rife as ever, perhaps even more so. ``In Sydney, there’s so much pressure to get into it,’’ says Jane, the former fashion executive, who was managing multi-million dollar budgets. ``If you’re not doing it, there’s something wrong with you. You get left behind. People want to be hip and on the money. It’s infectious.’’
And it’s insidious. So many who’ve been there will tell you how easy it is to cross the thin white line from recreational use to addiction. ``It just takes over,’’ says Nigel, who finally stopped taking heroin when he set up his own business with friends and could not bear the thought of stealing from them.
``It’s really no fun. You will never meet a happy addict – all addicts want to get rid of their addiction.’’
``I’d wake up in agony, it felt like a steamroller had run over me,’’ he says. ``I wasn’t using it to get high – once I was addicted it was a matter of having to keep using it just to keep normal.’’
Struggling to simply function without pain often means performing at anything more than a perfunctory level is beyond the addict’s capacity.
Human resources departments and the managers they buttress are well aware of what they might term the negative productivity implications of substance abuse and addiction. The Health Department survey found, for example, higher absenteeism in people with substance-use issues.
It’s not always like that, though. When John was consuming as many as 100 drinks a week, he wasn’t necessarily doing his best work, but he was working relentlessly. His managers either mysteriously missed all the signs of the problem, or found it convenient to be oblivious to John’s plight. He even got a six-figure bonus at the height of his alcoholism.
The reason is simple and cynical. ``A lot of employers love alcoholics because they’re so often workaholics as well,’’ he says.
As well as functioning alcoholics, there are legions of people who do manage, at least for a while, to keep their drug consumption under control. David Bullen, one of the four so-called rogue traders who recently rattled the nation’s largest bank, National Australia Bank, to its financial foundations, is sanguine about his years’ of using amphetamines and ecstasy.
He draws no link whatsoever between the judgement he showed in embracing regular use of party drugs and that displayed in the foreign currency options trades that cost NAB $360 million plus its chief executive and chairman – and some of its reputation. `` Speed and ecstasy I think can be a positive influence on some people, as long as they don’t get caught in a rut of taking them forever,’’ he says. ``I don’t think they are dangerous at all."
They and other drugs are hellishly dangerous, though, for the delirious drove that slides into misuse and addiction. The corporate and other costs are clear, but what gets scant attention is the benefit a business can get from someone who has managed to beat such a problem.
Part II Corporate volunteering in the Drug and Alcohol area (incl. the First Step Program)
``These people can sometimes be an incredible resource for a company,’’ says Simon McKeon, Melbourne executive director of Macquarie Bank, the legendary millionaires’ factory.
He’s led several of his staff into volunteering as counsellors at First Step, a rapid detoxification clinic for heroin addicts in bayside St Kilda, a suburb that remains an illicit hive despite its gentrification. Staff at ANZ Bank and Medibank Private have also volunteered.
First Step is partly funded by listed logistics company Toll Holdings.
Establishment law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques also sends cheques to the clinic. The partners match dollar for dollar the contributions from their junior colleagues.
Macquarie, Mallesons, Toll and other businesses are responding in part to a revolution called the triple bottom line. Businesses these days not only focus on profit, they also seek to be environmentally sensitive and socially responsible. It’s this last bit that’s proving the biggest challenge, and companies are being pushed hard by employees to show a little enlightened self-interest. It’s common for job applicants to question their potential bosses about what the company is doing about corporate social responsibility. If the answer disappoints, some candidates simply look elsewhere.
``My motive for doing it (volunteering at First Step) was probably a little misguided,’’ Macquarie’s McKeon says. ``I was doing it to inspire others in the office to do get involved, but halfway through I forgot all that because I was getting so much out it myself. I was being inspired by the people I was talking with. They are so strong.’’
That strength has been recognised by Paul Little, the chief executive of Toll Holdings, which employs 20,000 across Australia. Toll does more than help fund First Step. It’s evolved a second step.
``We offer jobs to some of the people who have gone through detox and stayed clean,’’ he says. ``It’s been an outstanding success, outstanding. The opportunities for work are starting to exceed the candidates available. It bewilders me that more companies don’t do this sort of thing. These people are highly qualified, highly intelligent and very determined to make a go of their life. If they get through all the challenges once they are detoxed, they are going to be pretty strong people.’’
The First Step clinic, of which Tim Costello was the inaugural chairman, is in a house donated by one of Paul Little’s friends, a transport millionaire whose daughter beat a heroin addiction after going through the rapid detox method pioneered by Western Australia doctor George O’Neil.
The key to O’Neil’s treatment is the implantation of a slow-release opiate blocker, Naltrexone, in the abdomen. It is a quick surgical procedure that requires only a local anaesthetic.
Each Thursday, about a dozen addicts are given the treatment at First Step by Dr John O’Donoghue, who travels from the country town where he helps treat teenagers with drug and alcohol problems. In the four years since the clinic was established, about 3000 implants have been performed.
After the cavity is stitched up, the addict, accompanied by a friend or relative, spends several hours going through the horror of detoxification. The people writhing on floor, vomiting, moaning, shivering, sneezing uncontrollably, then slipping into unconsciousness, come from all parts of the city. On a recent Thursday, a working-class Vietnamese immigrant was limping exhausted out the door, leaning on his heavily pregnant partner. Entering was a white, blond-haired woman in twin-set and pearls, an executive type who may well have just finished lunch in one of Collins Street’s sleek bistros. She was tearful. So was her mother.
At the end of the day, the addicts go home and the really hard work of staying clean starts. Despite the Naltrexone, which largely stops the effects of heroin, more than half the people who go through the treatment return to their addiction.
Fundamental to First Step’s program is the secondary support provided by trained carers like McKeon, who maintain telephone contact with the recovering addicts. ``For someone who had an addiction and was holding down a job, rapid detox, rather than having to take weeks off, is very attractive,’’ he says.
Many professionals with drug and alcohol problems prefer, though, to go to private clinics for a couple of weeks.
One is the rehabilitation centre at the Warburton Unit at Ivanhoe Private Rehabilitation Hospital, smack in the middle of Melbourne’s barbecue belt, where many lawyers, including a judge, doctors, executives and other high achievers get help. Whether it’s at a clinic like First Step, a private sanctuary like Warburton or even a customised treatment delivered at an addict’s home, the inescapable element is sustained abstinence.
Behind almost every addiction is a cause. ``Pretty much every addict has a problem of low self-esteem,’’ says Anne, a counsellor at Warburton and a recovering alcoholic (she has not had a drink for seven years).
For some, low self-esteem is a cause of addiction, for others it’s an effect. ``It ultimately came down to low self-esteem, which was related to growing up in a high-profile family,’’ says Nigel of his heroin years.
Depression is also a common cause and effect of drug abuse. Nicole Highet, a psychologist who works with beyondblue, the national depression initiative set up by former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, says many addicts started by self-medicating to deal with depression. The team at beyondblue reckon that as many as one million Australians have clinical depression.
``It (heroin) is the ultimate pain-killer,’’ says Nigel. ``It just kills any emotional pain.’’
Sexual abuse is often the reason for depression and addiction. In the case of John, the alcoholic former stockbroker, the person who gave him his first drink, when he was 15, was the Catholic priest who molested him. Jane, the fashion figure for whom cocaine was such a massive problem, also mentions such abuse in her past, but prefers not to discuss it.
Nick Cave, the internationally celebrated singer and songwriter from one of Melbourne’s establishment private schools, Caufield Grammar, is also well known for his former fondness of heroin. He wrote a song called `People Ain’t No Good’.
Perhaps he was wrong. Jane has left the fashion industry. She retrained, set up a business, married and realised her dream of having a child. Nicholas no longer smokes marijuana, has never felt happier and thrills to the thought of getting to work each morning to lead his team. John, who continues to have counselling for depression and goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings several times a week, is thriving as a financial adviser in a suburban firm.
And Nigel’s business is booming. ``It’s a happy ending,’’ he says. ``I felt wonderful when I gave it up. I’m so proud I did it.’’
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