Drunken confessions

I have always found the parable of the Prodigal Son sickeningly unfair, and I felt this again while driving a close relative down a motorway in a frightful gale at night to a residential rehab.

-That morning I’d had an emergency consultation in London on behalf of the said relative, with the head of the rehab place, who I’ll call Dr X. Throughout, I’d had the uneasy feeling that Dr X was subtly trying to make me feel at fault for not being sympathetic enough to my relative’s situation. Actually, I have suffered for years from his wild and selfish behaviour while on cocaine and alcohol, and have often tried to help him.

Dr X is an expert on addiction, and a self-confessed addict (though not to drugs or drink). His thesis was that he and my relative, and others like them, had a ‘disease’ which I, an ordinary person, a non-addict, could not fully understand. Yes, I was being made to feel second-best — even inferior — like the ‘good’ son in the parable. And I resented it.

I see on the internet that Dr X is still taking this line. And now, everywhere, in magazines, newspapers, blogs, on TV and radio, we are confronted with addicts telling their stories: of their indulgences, recoveries and sometimes their relapses. A new film, Beautiful Boy, directed by Felix Van Groeningen, is advertised as telling ‘the true story of a father and his drug-addicted son’. The young food writer and campaigner Jack Monroe who came out as ‘non-binary’ in 2017, has now just ‘come out’ again — as an alcoholic.

Hearing interviews recently with homeless people on the radio, I was struck by the way several talked about their addictions as if these were the natural course of events.