September

IT’S BEEN MORE than two months since I visited Jon Currie and he shook up my world with the words ‘pre-malignant addiction’. If damage has been done, I want to know. But the public-health system moves slowly — I’m still waiting for an appointment.

I can hardly complain; I’m not a real patient. Still, the longer I have to wait, the more time there is to dwell on the possible outcome. What if the results of these tests reveal that I have more in common with Jon’s patients than I can accept? And why does the thought of drinking again scare me just as much as the thought of not drinking again?

Moderate drinking is probably not an option if I have a damaged brain. And I’m not even sure I want to drink moderately: there are times when I really miss being drunk. I’m a little bored of always being in control; I want to surrender to the night and be taken on a journey. I want to see the ‘wonderful, curious things’ that Oscar Wilde spoke of so fondly. I don’t miss the messy, crying-into-warm-flat-beer-at-5.00-a.m. kinda drunk, but I do hanker for that liquid gold feeling when you’re a few drinks in, your inhibitions slowly dissolve, and you share a common buzz with your friends.

Most days, I don’t feel cheated because the upside to sobriety is a surprisingly lush plain. I have newfound confidence and a fitter body and mind, and in place of procrastination I have acquired the ability to get shit done. But lately, approaching the pointy end of my year-long sojourn from the sauce, there are times when I really feel the strain. It’s hard not to drink for this long, when practically everyone you know drinks regularly. It’s hard to stay on track, when alcohol seems to ambush you on every street corner. Sometimes I’m just plain bored. There’s something quite liberating about allowing yourself a night where you say, ‘Fuck it; I’m going to get smashed.’ It’s a tension-buster and a reward.

Yesterday, at the end of a long week, there were staff drinks at work and I found myself with my nose buried in a colleague’s empty beer bottle, inhaling the enticing smell of Crown Lager. You know you’re really missing booze when even the sniff of a Crownie has you salivating. My sense of smell is more keenly attuned to the aroma of alcohol than ever before. On the way home from work, I can sniff out a passenger’s lunchtime shiraz from the other end of the tram. When I asked my picture editor recently if she’d had a liquid lunch, she was taken aback. She hadn’t touched a drop. I’d picked up the faint smell of alcohol from a home-baked rum ball she’d eaten earlier in the day. My friends have grown accustomed to me sniffing their wine and beer before they have a sip. I close my eyes and inhale the rich fumes, as if trying to recapture the scent of a lover who has slipped away from me.

At night, I often dream of booze. The same recurring theme: I have fallen off the wagon. Sometimes it’s in spectacular fashion — vomiting on a bathroom floor or waking up dizzy with shagger’s hair and a strange man in my bed. In each dream I am bereft. When I wake, the sense of relief that I have not broken my booze ban is palpable, and this powers me forward. I like to think that these dreams are signposts, as I feel my way in the dark through a foreign land. They point to how gross that Crownie would taste on my breath the morning after a massive night and a few hours’ sleep. They point to the fleeting satisfaction of the quick fix.

But this obsession with booze, or the lack of it, makes me fearful. I wonder if these signposts point not only to my past, but also to my future. When I do finally relinquish control, how will I manage freedom? If my hedonistic streak has a more clinical explanation, that freedom might turn into a straitjacket, locking me into an old life I’ve spent more than eight months trying to change.

I’ve told close friends about my conversation with Jon Currie. Some find the idea that I might have a dependency on alcohol preposterous. I’m a high-functioning professional woman; I’m not what an addict looks like. Alcoholics drink whisky in brown paper bags; they stumble over and slur their words, lost in a hazy dreamscape. They live in squalor, or they might live well but hide their disease, drinking vodka in the bathroom before the kids get up. But perhaps those perceptions are false — a Hollywood version of what it means to be hooked. Addiction isn’t always so clear-cut.

Today, I meet someone who lived a long time in that grey space between sobriety and addiction. Will is a 41-year-old airline engineer from Melbourne. At 3.00 a.m., on a long night shift in April, he’d finished servicing the jets on his list and sat down in a quiet room for a break. He pulled out his iPhone and started to catch up with the day’s news. As he scrolled through stories, he found the article about my break from drinking. He told me, ‘I was high-fiving the air and saying, “Yes!” out loud. Everything you were writing was me.’

It’s been just over two years since Will left rehab. We’ve spoken on the phone and by email over the last few months, but never met in person. Today, I’m anxious as I come face to face with a man who has been through treatment for an alcohol problem, yet thinks we are living parallel lives. He’s a big man, with a gentle demeanour and a permanent smile. His handshake is firm and friendly. We’re sitting in the upper atrium of the Age building, away from the bustle of the cafe downstairs. I joke that I’m meeting more heavy drinkers sober than I ever did when I was pissed. He laughs and says that, like me, he never thought he’d find himself at the point he’s reached, as a non-drinker after so many years of partying. ‘My journey to the “High Sobriety” club was a mammoth one,’ he says, and I bristle at the name, thinking I’ve inadvertently formed a Christian prayer group.

His story starts out similarly to mine, although he’d turned 17 before he had his first drink. He saw it as a sign that he was maturing, becoming a man. By the time he reached his twenties, his drinking had become ‘professional’. At 23, after stacking on a lot of weight, he decided to give up the grog and go on a fitness kick. He enjoyed his trimmer, sober self. Then, when he earned his engineer’s licence, he had what he describes as a ‘fuck-it moment’, getting on the piss to celebrate. He’d lasted nine months without booze — almost exactly where I am now. As the weeks and months progressed, his old drinking habits crept in. Four beers twice a week became five beers three times a week, then six, seven, eight beers, until he was drinking a dozen beers a day. But that was okay because ‘I was the bumbling, happy, fun, silly drunk. Everyone loved me. Life was fun.’

His thirties sneaked up, and it wasn’t long before he found himself knocking back 18 cans of VB every day. Some days he might only drink ten beers, but they’d be followed by a bottle of gin. He never drank at work, but he knows there were days when he was impaired, and he frequently drove while over the limit. He was never pulled over. The thought of what could have been still haunts him.

When he came home from work, he’d down a can before he’d even taken his uniform pants off. He drank in front of the television. He drank down the pub with mates. Often he drank alone. His partner of 15 years asked him to cut down, and he would — for a day or two. It didn’t last. Only later, during counselling in treatment, did he learn that she’d packed her bags on more than one occasion. Having convinced himself that he didn’t have a problem, he was oblivious. But the ‘dead soldiers’ on bin night were hard to ignore. ‘When you go to the pub, you don’t see it because you’re just drinking a glass. The glass goes, it’s refilled, and you continue on again. There’s no evidence left behind, which is probably the danger of the pub.’

At his local, he met similar souls. ‘When you have a group of heavy drinkers at the pub, they have a bond, a kinship, and they’re able to talk about their problems without talking about them directly. That’s a very male thing, I guess. Those people were my family. You’d sit at the bar and have a chat about life, about philosophy.’

Will’s pub family reminds me of some of the regulars at The Rose. The sense of community has its benefits: mateship and social cohesion, an antidote to loneliness. But it can also harbour denial. When your problem is mirrored back at you in the faces of your friends, it’s no longer a problem; it’s normal. ‘I had some friends who liked to drink with me because they saw me as worse than them. They had their own problems, clearly, but I think it gave them self-confidence because they could look at my drinking and think they weren’t that bad. But then, I could always find someone who was worse than me, someone who was another level of severe.’

As the year of his 40th birthday approached, Will’s health started deteriorating rapidly. Burdened by huge weight gain and the beginnings of a nervous breakdown, he finally sought help. He told his GP that he felt like he was dying. ‘Physically, my body was shutting down. I had trouble breathing, my mind was a mess, I wasn’t thinking straight, I wasn’t performing like I used to. It was severe. He took a blood test. My liver was looking bad, my blood pressure was really up — everything pointed towards me being in real trouble. I was here at this low point, knowing it was a fork in the road. Turn left and die, turn right and live.’

Even then, he still didn’t identify as an addict. He thought that he’d just stop drinking, have some counselling, and get on with things. He was a tough, no-nonsense Aussie bloke who was going to beat this on his own terms. After regular visits with a psychologist, Will reluctantly agreed to enter a private rehab facility. He had to share a room, a big ask for a fiercely private person. Inside this facility, where drug- and alcohol-addled ghosts drifted in the corridors, he was convinced that he was different.

The first few days were boring. ‘I didn’t really partake in any of the programs; I didn’t really seem like I fitted into it. I don’t know if it was day three or day four, but I had breakfast, and afterwards I just sat on a couch and played games and read magazines because there’s not much to do. Then, I just started to feel like shit. It was nothing like I’ve ever felt before. It was just getting worse and worse. I was shaky, itchy inside — you feel curly. But it was frightening; it scared the shit out of me. I said to the nurse, “I think I’m not well. There’s something wrong with me.” I thought I had a cold or something. And they said, “It’s starting.” I was a mess. I was like that for weeks. My mate who dropped me off came round to see me and I was just a shaking ball.’

The physical withdrawal took Will by surprise. He knew drinking had compromised his body to the point that it was failing him, but he had no idea of the extent of his problem. ‘I didn’t believe I was bad enough that I needed to go to rehab. You think of rehab and you think of movie stars taking cocaine, and I thought, no, I’m not like that. You don’t believe it because it’s just alcohol.’

He left rehab after three weeks, but it would take six months for the shakes to stop completely. He knew that he could never drink again. Yet staying on track meant dismantling his old life. It was a ‘brutal cut’ to ditch his old drinking buddies, and it was painful to avoid the pub, particularly on a warm summer’s day, when his mind would taunt him with the sight, taste, and smell of cold beer. Now, he rarely goes to parties. If he does, he creates a ‘plan of attack’ to protect himself from temptation. It always involves leaving early. ‘Drinking puts you in a psychological or behavioural mode, and if you don’t have synergy with that mode then you’re not part of the party. You’ve just got to learn to find other ways in life.’

This makes me sad. Is it really the case that you can be the life and soul of the party or you can be a non-drinker, but you can’t be both? As much as I try to convince myself that wild times and sobriety are not mutually exclusive, I relate to Will’s experience. There’s no escaping the imbalance in synergies when you’re sober at a party and everyone else is on the piss. Sometimes it’s less pronounced than others, and you can dance like a whirling dervish, whooping it up as if you’ve just knocked back six tequila shots, but other times you have that feeling your immersion is incomplete. After the first few months of this sobriety adventure, I was convinced that I didn’t need alcohol to be outrageous and uninhibited. But the longer I abstain, the harder it is to believe that fully. Sometimes, without a drink in my hand, I feel like a pale imitation of that riotous party girl I once was. I miss the freedom of being drunk; I’m nostalgic for the unique sense of merriment you share with fellow drinkers. It’s fun and unpredictable in a way that sobriety can’t easily replicate. Often, my nights out feel tame in comparison to days of old. There are times when I wonder if my sober self has become imbued with a hint of beige.

For Will, giving up grog meant that he had to redefine his identity. He’s no longer the bumbling, fun guy, always ready to crack open a beer with his mates. His new personality is still in its infancy, but just as he once identified as the drunk party animal, now sobriety defines him. ‘I had a very distinguished person say to me at work that I was a disgrace for not drinking, and I was so proud of that. As shocking as it was, and the mixed emotions it brought up, jeez, it was a trophy. I’m a totally new person. I would take that over my old identity any day of the week. I’m looking forward to what I can achieve in life.’

But as I listen to him tell me about the things that fill his new life — pottering around the house doing odd jobs, catching up with friends for coffee, and leaving parties early to treat himself to a slice of cake on the way home — it sounds so conservative and controlled. He’s moved from that grey space between addiction and sobriety, into a world that is a different shade of grey. But for him, there is no other way. ‘I can’t drink moderately. That frightens me. If I had one sip of one beer it won’t be that Saturday I’ll be back into the 18 cans again, but I can see myself slipping into oblivion. It gives you the confidence that you can have one and that’s fine. And then next month, something special comes along and you end up having two. And you get confident about that, and this may go on for a year or so, and after five years you’re back to 18 cans a day again. That’s a reality for me, and there’s a very thick, deep line in the sand and I will not cross it. I will not have one. I avoid it. That’s the strategy I live with. I will have to do this for the rest of my life, and it’s a battle that I may lose one day. But I’m fairly determined. I want to live; I don’t want to die a horrible, painful death.’

Still, as he speaks of the fragility of his own mortality, he equivocates when asked if he thinks he’s an alcoholic. He stresses that his doctor classified him as a heavy drinker, not an alcoholic. In rehab, he didn’t believe the term was an apt description. And now? ‘In some capacity, by some classification, to some degree, I’m an alcoholic. Maybe not the classic category-five alcoholic, but in some manner I am.’

I’m astonished that someone who was drinking 18 cans of beer every day, and has been through withdrawal that left his body wracked by tremors, is talking about degrees of addiction. When I stopped drinking, I had no unpleasant symptoms. I felt better immediately. Yet, as we wind the interview up and the conversation shifts to my abstinence, it’s clear that he sees me as a kindred soul. He asks if I’ll go back to drinking when my year is up. I don’t know how to answer. As I umm and aah, his eyes fix on mine and, for the first time in more than an hour, he’s not smiling. His expression is urgent. ‘You have to ask yourself, who do you want the new Jill Stark to be? Is this Jill Stark happier than the old one? Do you like yourself more now or before?’ It’s an avenue I’m not comfortable exploring with a relative stranger, but then I look at the notepad resting on my knees and see the most intimate details of his private life. I tell him that I’m definitely happier now. I’ve gained a lot from not drinking, but I’m hoping I can find a middle ground. Ideally, I’d like to drink moderately, but I worry that my track record suggests I’m no good at this. I don’t tell him that I’ve been fantasising about getting drunk.

It’s hard to imagine a life without the occasional Saturday-night blowout, I say. It’s how I’ve lived for 20 years. It’s how my friends live. He tells me that I’ll have to learn to be brutal with my friends. ‘It will take two years to change the social structure around Jill Stark,’ he says. ‘It’s the rock climber–ambulance driver scenario. If you hang around with rock climbers, they’re going to tell you how sensational it is — the exhilaration, the fun; they’re going to tell you it’s such a thrill and you’ll really love it. If you hang around with ambulance drivers, they’re going to tell you about the broken bones they see, the horrible injuries, the deaths.’

I don’t begrudge him the sermon. This man hit rock-bottom only to find there were seven layers of hell hidden in the basement. Like many who embark on that journey, he can’t bear the thought of anyone else suffering the same fate. Just as he took his drinking to the extreme, his passion for sobriety has an intensity that borders on evangelism. He doesn’t mean to, but the pressure he places on me when he says, ‘Jill, I really hope you don’t drink again,’ is heavy. I don’t know if he’s pleading for me or for himself. He’s co-opted my story as his own. I don’t want the responsibility of my sobriety somehow being tied to his.

He tells me that he wants to be an ambassador for people battling alcohol problems. ‘My message that I’ve got from all of this is that there needs to be more of a campaign of watching your mates. Watch your family, watch your friends, because they’re people like me, who do slip into oblivion. People like us, who used to go out and get hammered on a Friday night — it evolves into a bigger problem for us.’

At the time, when he says ‘people like us’, I think he’s referring to others like him, who have sought treatment for a drinking problem. Listening back to my tape later, I’m not so sure. In his eyes, we are both lifelong members of the ‘High Sobriety’ club. Or at least we should be. But despite the respect and admiration I have for this man, who has overcome such challenges and now wants to share that wisdom, I don’t think we’re the same. I’ve never felt the need to drink every day. I can’t conceive of a future in which my daily routine would include knocking back half a bottle of gin or the best part of a slab of beer. But I don’t suppose Will ever imagined himself that way, either. He’s a professional, high-functioning man with a stable home life, whose binge drinking got away from him. He’s only seven years older than me. Who knows where I would have been seven years from now if I hadn’t taken this step back?

I’VE BEEN INVITED to judge a short-story competition run by Odyssey House, one of Australia’s largest drug and alcohol treatment centres. When the entries arrive in the mail, I’m impressed by the standard of writing. The work is supposed to be fictional, but many of the stories are so searing and visceral, they could only have come from lived experience.

Entrants must include reference to alcohol or drugs in the piece, and write to the theme ‘how did I get here?’ One writes about a teenager’s reluctant visit to her father. There are marijuana plants growing on his balcony, and he smokes a bong in front of her with a stoned friend. Another tells the story of a woman whose gambling debts spiral out of control. The narrator mocks the positive-thinking, ‘life is for living’ messages she sees on television and in magazines. ‘Life is where you end up and you just get through all the shit the best you can. Right now, I’m up to my neck in it, and the shovel I’ve got has a very short handle.’ One story, told from the perspective of a boy whose mother died of a drug overdose, conveys his confusion and terror as he’s placed in the care of the state when his father, also an addict, is sentenced to 12 years in jail for armed robbery.

But the standout winner moves all three judges to tears. It’s the story of an out-of-control 15-year-old girl. She hides vodka in her school locker and turns up to class stoned. There has been no love in her life. When Maryann, a motherly addiction counsellor, tries to reach out to her, she runs away, seeking solace in the bed of a nameless stranger: ‘My heart had no room for anyone — not even me.’ But slowly she learns to trust Maryann, and reveals the secret of her sexual abuse. This story, hauntingly real and yet remarkable in its restraint, is made all the more poignant when we learn that it’s a eulogy to Maryann, who passed away not long after coming into the girl’s life. Yet, despite the grief, she finds a way out of her hopelessness and goes on to have a family of her own, ending the story with a question: ‘How did I get so lucky?’

In a meeting at Odyssey House Victoria’s Richmond head-quarters with the other judges — author and child-protection campaigner Barbara Biggs, and Odyssey’s chief executive Stefan Gruenert — we are unanimous in our decision. It leaves me thinking of this young woman’s struggle, and I realise something. My ‘fuck it, I just want to get smashed’ moments are usually about boredom and pleasure-seeking. When I get drunk, it’s a choice. For so many others, it’s about obliteration — a way to block out the pain. Yet, despite the tragic circumstances that cause already vulnerable people to seek solace in a bottle or through a needle, as a community we still treat addiction as if it’s a character failing. How often do we turn our heads as we judge the unpleasant-smelling man staggering through the train carriage? It’s funny how we view public drunkenness as socially unpalatable if it’s an old man drinking Scotch from a brown paper bag, but it’s a bit of fun if it’s a group of young women causing a commotion on a hen’s night. It makes me wish, once again, that I’d shown more compassion to my granddad. I was young, but I still judged him.

After we make our decision, I stay behind to chat to Stefan. The stories we’ve read are real life for many of the people he sees in treatment at Odyssey House. He hopes that this inaugural short-story competition will encourage others to share their experiences of drug and alcohol addiction. The stigma of substance abuse is fairly entrenched, he says, but it’s slowly changing. Those who have long toiled in this unglamorous sector of health prevention and rehabilitation are starting to see a shift, both here and overseas — people struggling with addiction are choosing to waive anonymity and to publicly celebrate their road to recovery. They and others are giving addiction a visible presence, through walks organised by groups such as the United Kingdom’s Recovery Academy, and Faces and Voices of Recovery in the United States. Melbourne’s first recovery walk is scheduled for 2012. Central to the movement’s philosophy is that everyone’s road out of addiction will be different and, to borrow a cliché, recovery is not a destination but a journey.

‘Previously, recovery had a whole lot of baggage around it. It was just the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, and you had to say, “I’m an alcoholic or a drug addict and I will be for life, and I’m going to completely give up.” It worked for a lot of people, but it wasn’t very inclusive,’ Stefan says. ‘Recovery’s now much broader, less concerned about the definition and more a movement for people to celebrate wellbeing and change, and for inspiring others to think about their quality of life. Whether you’re still using or not, you can be in recovery — even if you’re working towards it.’

By lifting the veil on addiction, in the same way that mental illness is slowly being demystified, the hope is that more people will seek help, and that the public will come to view substance dependency as they do any other medical condition. ‘You don’t have cancer and [feel as if you have to] be anonymous, and that’s part of the shift,’ Stefan says. ‘All of the self-help fellowship movements have been very underground and hidden because of the shame and stigma. It just feels like the timing’s right for people who have their own personal journeys of addiction to suddenly be okay to start sharing their stories and not lose their job or fear that that’s going to hurt them. We’re at the start of some upswing here, where you’ll see more of the people like Ben Cousins — not just the high-profile people but at all levels of society — sharing their story in workplaces and at barbecues, saying, “Actually, I had issues years back and I’m better now.”’

When Cousins, one of the AFL’s biggest stars and arguably one of the greatest to ever play the game, had his very public fall from grace, there were many lining up to condemn him. He had fled a booze bus, spent time in a Los Angeles rehab clinic, and been arrested for drug possession, which led to a 12-month playing ban for bringing the game into disrepute. He was a supremely talented, wealthy young man with Hollywood good looks, who seemed to be throwing it all away for the sake of a party. Yet, following a screening of a documentary outlining Cousins’ battles with substance abuse, Channel Seven invited Australian Drug Foundation chief executive John Rogerson to explain the complexities of addiction to the audience at home. For Rogerson, and for many others in the field, it was a sign that addiction was starting to be taken seriously by mainstream media, and to be viewed as a health problem rather than a lifestyle choice.

But sometimes the spotlight can be a curse. As more people seek help, treatment services are buckling under the weight of demand. Between 2000 and 2010, there was a 29 per cent increase in the number of publicly funded treatments for drug and alcohol problems in Australia, with booze being the principal drug of addiction in nearly half (48 per cent) of all cases, up from 37 per cent of cases in 2000. These figures don’t include those who drink heavily while using another drug. In Victoria, the Salvation Army estimates that the drug and alcohol treatment sector is already under-funded by at least 50 per cent. Nationally, the situation’s no better. Those in the sector complain that politicians are quick to allay middle-class paranoia about violent smackheads and the rise of illegal drugs, however spurious the evidence, but are loath to tackle a legal substance that wreaks widespread havoc — perhaps because it’s a drug that most voters enjoy on a regular basis.

A senior drug and alcohol–sector professional told me that they were once forced to sit next to a politician at a press conference, nodding in stony-faced agreement as the pollie announced a multi-million-dollar crackdown on methamphetamine. The money came after a series of hysterical and largely unfounded stories in sections of the media that claimed there had been a massive spike in the use of the drug, often known as ‘ice’, ‘meth’, or ‘crystal meth’. There was a heightened level of concern about this nasty substance, which can cause users to be aggressive and delusional. Yet there was no evidence of an ice epidemic on the streets of Melbourne. Still, when the government comes knocking, you don’t turn them away. They smiled for the cameras and accepted the funds. Then, much of the money was spent where it was needed most — in alcohol-treatment services.

In 2008, Labor announced that $53 million was to be committed to a national binge-drinking strategy, to be rolled out over four years from 2009. But much of the money has gone to anti-drinking campaigns and early intervention for young people; very little has been spent on the treatment sector. Like other rehab facilities across Australia, Odyssey House has experienced a massive increase in the number of people presenting with alcohol problems in the last decade. At any given time, there can be 100 or more people waiting for a place in Odyssey’s residential rehabilitation facilities. Stefan says that only about 10 per cent of people with a drinking problem will seek help, compared to up to 80 per cent of those with an illicit drug habit. When people reach that fork in the road, just as Will did — where left means oblivion and right means survival — they can easily be hurried down the wrong path if there’s a long wait for treatment. Will was fortunate that he could afford a private facility, but even then he waited several weeks before a place in residential rehab came up.

In the public system, the situation is dire. Demand grows exponentially every year. I’m reminded of a man who left a comment online, underneath my binge-drinking story, in April. He’d been fighting alcoholism for 26 years. ‘I wish I could give up for a few days let alone a few months or a lifetime … my liver is getting more fragile and I can tell brain damage is setting in. I’m not stupid … [I] have two degrees, teaching at university and about to start a PhD.’ He lamented the lack of publicly funded treatment options for those with alcohol addiction, predicting that he’d have to get much more seriously ill before being offered support. ‘Of course, if I get taken out of my house in a body bag I’ll be sadly beyond help.’

As more people find the confidence to speak up about their battles with alcohol, Stefan fears that a system already at breaking point will be swamped. ‘We’re getting a lot of people in their mid to late thirties, but we’re also getting people right into their sixties, and I think that’s going to be another emerging issue among older Australians. We’ve got a growing cohort of people going to be entering aged care, and a lot of them have had drinking patterns all their life that have been pretty unhealthy. How are we going to manage those people?’

At the other end of the spectrum is a young generation of drinkers who have grown up in a culture that embraces excess and teaches them to mark every life event with alcohol. For most teens, binge drinking won’t lead to dependency. But for some, it’s the gateway to addiction. The number of young people being treated for alcohol-related brain damage grew five-fold in a decade. Arbias, one of Australia’s only treatment services for brain injuries caused by drinking, saw the number of patients aged 16 to 25 jump from 120 in 1997 to 600 in 2007.

A few years ago, I spent the day with the Youth Substance Abuse Service, Victoria’s biggest treatment and support service for 12- to 25-year-olds. I visited its residential rehabilitation centre and drop-in day program in Fitzroy, an area traditionally associated with high rates of drug and alcohol problems. About 30 young people, mostly under the age of 21, visited it daily. I like to think I’m a fairly worldly-wise person, but I was shocked by what I found. There were kids there who had suffered unimaginable neglect and abuse. Some of them sold themselves on the street to feed their habit; many were homeless. When the centre opened its doors in the late 1990s, heroin was the main problem, but now, overwhelmingly, it’s alcohol. In a decade, the number of young people being treated for alcohol dependency has doubled. Some are so hooked they’re drinking a slab of beer or two bottles of spirits a day.

After I leave Odyssey House, I go back to the Youth Substance Abuse Service, now known as the Youth Support and Advocacy Service, to see what’s changed. I arrive at the Fitzroy residential withdrawal centre — an eight-bed facility for young people detoxing from alcohol and other drugs — and a support worker invites me into the living area, as I wait for chief executive Paul Bird to make his way over from the YSAS office nearby. It’s a colourful space that feels like a big share house, with a pool table, couches, beanbags, and a pinboard filled with photographs of young people smiling and pulling faces. A punching bag hangs in the courtyard.

A guy, wearing a baseball cap and baggy jeans, walks past the dining table, where I’m waiting. He scowls at me as we make eye contact. He’s gaunt and pale. Despite the tough exterior, he has a child’s face — he can’t be much older than 16.

When Paul arrives, I’m keen to know what kinds of back-grounds the kids who come here for help have. As it was when I last visited, he says that most of them come from broken homes, have been in trouble with the police, or have experienced homelessness. What’s changed is that the service is now seeing more young people who came to Australia as refugees from Africa and Afghanistan, and have lost their way in our drinking culture. Alcohol abuse is so rife in those communities that the centre recently closed its doors to new referrals for a week to look after young Sudanese men exclusively.

‘Their parents have come from a stricter culture, where drinking and substance use are not practised regularly, and then they arrive here, to a very open culture, and they’re all of a sudden put in an Australian school with Australian friends. Their friends are completely different from their family, so you see family breakdown as well,’ Paul tells me. ‘They may have greater ties to community groups, but not to their parents and elders, so they kind of go from nought to 60 very fast. You see very heavy substance use in a very short period of time, and that’s causing massive issues with anger and violence, not to mention that alcohol and drugs are used as a way to escape from the trauma they’ve experienced in their homeland.’

It’s not surprising that these new Australians, suddenly furnished with freedom and access to cheap booze, would mimic the ways of their adopted country. And it almost certainly doesn’t help that many migrants are being housed in already disadvantaged areas, such as Greater Dandenong, in Melbourne’s south-east, which has the second-highest youth unemployment rate in Victoria.

But the increase in demand for treatment is not just in underprivileged communities. The YSAS helpline increasingly fields calls from parents in Melbourne’s growth corridors. In these outer suburban areas, where there are inadequate or often non-existent public-transport links and few after-school activities for young people, excessive drinking is a burgeoning problem. Paul says: ‘People have moved there to get a bigger house. They see the developers’ adverts, they see images of people frolicking in fields, and they go there as a lifestyle choice — and suddenly they’ve got a very big house, mortgaged to the hilt, their commute times have increased, both parents are at work, so the kids come home from school alone. They may end up with another peer group who doesn’t go straight home from school, and that’s where disengagement comes from. The stress, financially, is so great that families are just breaking up, but they still look prosperous because they’ve got big houses, they’ve got the McMansions. There’s a kind of facade that there’s wealth and wellbeing there, but if you look behind it, nobody sees that.’

Paul says, too, that while boredom, frustration, and the risk-taking nature of teenagers can contribute to them turning to alcohol, it’s also behaviour they learn from their parents, many of whom drink to cope with financial and relationship problems. ‘In the past, [parents] may have had the social connections to deal with this, but now they’re living in the outer suburbs, they have less connection. They’re less engaged with their kids, and they’re not established in local football or the myriad things that more-established suburbs have. There’s more alcohol use, and anger and violence in the family, and learned behaviours that the kids have picked up as a result of their environment.’

Despite the increase in alcohol and drug problems in these communities, services like YSAS are trying to cater for such growing suburbs without extra funding. In six years of health reporting, I’ve watched the treatment sector buckle under the weight of seemingly never-ending growth in demand. Governments have talked tough on cracking down on alcohol-related violence and teenage binge drinking, yet those at the sharp end of the problem continue to flounder, with limited money to help those most in need. In March 2011, Victoria’s auditor-general released a damning report, asserting that the state’s drug and alcohol treatment system was chronically under-funded, after successive state Labor governments had failed to act on 31 system reviews over the last decade. As the politicians sat on their hands, waiting times for residential rehab had doubled. The report also revealed a revolving-door system, with 70 per cent of those treated later re-admitted, after suffering a relapse. And not only has funding failed to keep pace with the growth in demand, but it has actually gone backwards in terms of per-capita spending.

When former premier John Brumby released his much-vaunted Alcohol Action Plan for Victoria in 2008, it committed $14 million to awareness campaigns and help for GPs to support people with drinking problems, but gave no new funding to the treatment sector. The Baillieu government has pledged to address the problem, but services such as YSAS and Odyssey House won’t see any new cash until the completion of a long public-consultation process — essentially, another system review.

In the meantime, I wonder what will happen to the teenagers who drink themselves into oblivion night after night, and find there’s nowhere to go when they have a moment of clarity that gives them the impetus to seek help. How many of those disaffected kids in the outer suburbs will slip from binge drinking to dependency, when proper support might have prevented that trajectory?

It must be unbelievably frustrating for those who see firsthand how vital it is to treat addiction early. Awareness campaigns are simply not enough. But there is hope. They’re buoyed by the rise of the recovery movement, and by youth-led organisations such as Hello Sunday Morning, which celebrate those who choose not to drink. They hope that, just as the boozy photos and status updates on Facebook create a social-contagion effect, the growing numbers of young people talking about taking a break from drinking or going teetotal will have a ripple effect in peer groups.

There’s some evidence that this is already happening. It doesn’t make the headlines, but there are a growing number of young people who are staying sober or delaying their first drink. The Australian School Students Alcohol and Drug Survey, which is carried out every three years and is considered the most reliable gauge of substance use in young people, shows that the number of 12- to 17-year-olds who had never had an alcoholic drink grew from 12 per cent in 2002 to 18 per cent in 2008, when the last survey was conducted. The 2010 National Drug Strategy Household Survey recorded that 77 per cent of 12- to 15-year-olds had not had a drink in the previous 12 months — up from 70 per cent in the 2007 survey. Among 16- to 17-year-olds, the proportion who had not drunk in the previous year increased from 24 per cent to 32 per cent over the two surveys.

What may help boost those numbers is the increasing list of celebrities who are proving that you can be sober and cool. British pop star Lily Allen gave up drinking after confessing her wild-child ways were turning her into a ‘character in a comic, and that character is always drunk’. In July, Oasis bad boy Liam Gallagher quit booze after ‘20 years drinking and messing about’, and said that it improved his singing voice. And at the tender age of 21, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, hero to millions of children, turned his back on the bottle, saying he’d become too reliant on alcohol. He said he got swept away in the celebrity lifestyle and had been using booze to fit in. More locally, in June, 23-year-old Triple J radio host Alex Dyson became the 1000th person to take on the Hello Sunday Morning challenge, with a three-month break from drinking; the publicity from his decision led to an immediate jump in sign-ups.

This is perhaps the most powerful way to change an environment that makes it so difficult for young people to turn down a drink. It’s not about telling younger Australians not to drink; it’s about promoting the idea that alcohol is something you enjoy, not something you need. As Chris Raine says, ‘It’s easy to get swept up in a drinking culture. Sometimes we just need a rope to pull us back to dry land.’

The question remains: is that rope strong enough to bear the weight of a generation at risk of being dragged under?