It finally happened. Tonight, for the first
time, Russell Brand really made me laugh. Was it one of his eloquent, witty
descriptions of his scrotum? His always hilarious hair? No, sadly it was his
earnest documentary about drug and alcohol treatment.
Russell,
you see, is a convert. Having realised the admirable accomplishment of getting,
and for a decade staying, clean, he now thinks that the way he did it –
residential, abstinence-based rehab – is the only way; and (ironically for a guy not averse to taking the piss
out of religious faith) he spruiks it with positively evangelical zeal.
What
could have been an informative and powerful documentary was marred by Brand’s
puritanical insistence that only one road leads to sobriety. We were treated to
the spectacle of his visit to a busy methadone clinic, where he talked over a
softly-spoken addiction specialist. If you’ve ever heard a Christian debate a
gay Buddhist you’ll know the tone of the discussion – “You’re a nice person,
and I love you, despite the fact that everything you do and think is not only
wrong but evil”; that sort of thing.
The
real irony is that his own documentary highlights the flaw in his thesis. We
begin with his immediate motivation for making the program – the death of his
friend, Amy Winehouse – and end on the story of a middle-aged addict who Russell
tries to help into rehab (we learn over the end-credits that she checked
herself out after only three weeks. Oh, well, it’s her, not the program).
While
lamenting that he wishes he’d been able to do more for her, Russell somehow
misses a glaring fact: at the time of her final relapse, Winehouse had been
clean for more than five weeks after completing a residential rehab program.
And
that’s the problem with abstinence-based treatment for heroin addiction – as
opposed to alcoholism: it renders relapse more dangerous. While the methadone
Brand demonises has its faults (that’s another discussion), it does have one
prodigious benefit. If you’re on a maintenance dose, your first slip off the
wagon is much less likely to kill you.
None
of this stops him sashaying into Parliament and preaching his gospel of
abstinence before a committee on the drug problem – his testimony strewn with
the phrase “We believe” (While we’re on it, I know Russell can afford a suit.
I’ve even seen him wear one – if there’s a red carpet or a talk-show host
nearby. Yet, when addressing his nation’s parliament on one of the few things
he takes seriously, he appears in distressed jeans, singlet and Stetson,
dripping with cheap jewellery. Go figure).
He’s
right about one thing, though. Once the beast’s on your back, it’s never really
off again. When he showed a video of himself, back in the day, bent over a strip of foil smoking heroin, all I
could think was: “Good god, what a waste of perfectly good smack; has he never
heard of syringe-outfits?”
Now,
I don’t mean to imply that Brand’s preferred treatment never works. Some people
are capable of facing and wrangling the demons that led them to addiction, over
twelve weeks, whilst in the depths of withdrawal-psychosis. Others need the
time afforded by methadone. In both cases, the majority of people who begin the
program will fail and relapse.
And there’s
the point. The aim of treatment is to keep the minority capable of reforming
alive long enough to do it; and to minimise the harm done by the rest to
society and themselves. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Abstinence is
always the goal of drug rehabilitation, but to achieve it you have to survive. You do what works – anything.
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