Someone once called Stephen Fry “a stupid person’s idea of what a clever
person is like”. Which is unkind: there’s nothing wicked about being a bit
stupid, or admiring celebrities who seem brainy and cuddly, or enjoying a
faux-donnish, avuncular figure who admits his problems with depression and
makes you feel as if you understand long words.
There is, however, something reprehensible about that celebrity using – as Fry
does in his new memoirs, More Fool Me – that studied air of clever, friendly
harmlessness to brag about years of deliberate illegality: cocaine use
undertaken not out of desperation or sadness but “because I really, really
liked it”.
And because it was a bond with “well-known artists, actors, comics, musicians,
Euro-trash, wild childs, supermodels and aristos”. People who, he explains,
would get the “A-Charlie” from knowledgeable dealers like his, stuff pure
enough to cause “less diarrhoea, nasal bleeding and nausea” than the junk
ordinary punters get.
Fry makes an attempt at the history, biology and ecology of the cocaine
community – his lot, at least – and admits that substances can have
different effects on different people, and that he is lucky to have sailed
through his habit as a high-functioning success.
He also admits it wasted time and money, when he could have been “writing,
performing, thinking, exercising, living” (the mind boggles at the thought
of how much he would have been on telly without it).
He admits that some of us feel “contempt, envy, resentment and scorn” for “a
spoiled minority, to which I find myself belonging willy-nilly”. He points
out that addiction is a disease, which it is, though his account of himself
makes it clear that it was more greed than painful craving and that he
despises pity. What is more: he thinks this admission is enough to defuse
contempt.
But you know what? My contempt just keeps on growing, through the lavish,
detailed, even instructional cocaine sections (seems it helped that when
doing highly paid voiceovers for L’Oréal or Bold Automatic, he would pinch
the audio company’s tape-editing razor blades to chop out lines). Still it
grows, despite all my attempts not to feel it, in the social sketch of his
years on coke and the name-dropping of friends dead and alive (Sebastian
Horsley, Russell Brand, Philip Seymour Hoffman).
He explains that he would meet a delightful dealer over a cappuccino or a chat
and be careful not to “treat them like servants but probably overdo the
deliberately non-patronising small talk, just as one does in conversation
with bin-men and builders”. He says not one of them was violent, or morally
inferior, just “incredibly decent friends”.
Of course they were decent to you, you fool! You are rich! You always paid up!
You weren’t driven to crime or selling sex to get them their money! He has
no awareness, it seems, that these café dealers are supplied by harder men,
and dependent on a hideous international trade in which the world’s poor,
and their children, find horrible deaths: shot or drowned, tortured or
doubled in agonies when plastic packages burst inside them.
Fry’s world is not the dark estate alley, his confreres are not the
10-year-old runners, the swaggering gang boys who will cry in prison cells
for their wrecked futures, or the girls they trade and rape as part of an
urban social ecology intimately entwined with the drug trade. Curiously,
teenagers today seem more aware of all that than this middle-aged man.
But his world is different, like that of other druggy public figures too
bright, or too ashamed, to write about it in the oh-dear-me tone he adopts.
He offers a line (geddit? oh, the wit!) of places where he snorted cocaine.
Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Clarence House; the Lords and Commons;
the Ritz, Savoy, Claridges, Dorchester; St James’ clubs; the BBC, this
newspaper and the Times, and the classier magazine offices. He titteringly
apologises, taunting any of them to call the police or “the club secretary”.
Enough. I wish he hadn’t done it, but probably the thrill of writing about it
all, and getting monstered by boring old bags like me, was almost as much
fun as shoving the stuff up his nose in the first place.
He may regret it, but in his language his support of the trade and his
preening humblebrag about it probably counts as no more than “a boo-boo”.
So what to do? Move away, just as one does at parties when some grainy-nosed
bore starts going on at you with high, echoing giggles and wild sociable
punches on the shoulder. Hope, for his sake (Fry’s not a bad man, nor an
unkind one), that he does not go back to drugs when his fame fades, or
suffer too badly from the well-attested ex-user’s depression. But think,
too, of how to dissuade future Frys, as this book certainly won’t.
Some favour full legalisation, to kill the drug trade dead and force
skunkheads and coke-sniffers to line up in Boots with all the other
afflicted snivellers and rheumatics. Preferably in the most embarrassing
queue. I am not sure: the arguments on legalisation have never yet quite
swayed me.
But what certainly would help the artistic and performing community to which
Fry belongs, and to which others aspire, would be if the gatekeepers of fame
– TV, film and other media bosses – took a sharper line with illegal drug
users.
What happens now is that after a slap on the wrist and a brief suspension,
even performers formally charged and convicted get restored to their jobs.
And far more are never challenged, even when caught white-nosed on work
premises. There are no random tests, and no terror, as there is for
sportsmen, that careers will be torpedoed by any exposure as illegal drug
users.
One of the most heartbreaking stories of 2008 was the double death – first of
Natasha Collins, who drowned in the bath after an overdose; and days later
of her fiancé, Mark Speight, who hanged himself, tormented by the disaster.
He was a much-loved children’s TV presenter, she an actress and model. And
it was impossible not to reflect that if those two had known that the risk
of being outed as users would mean no more broadcast work for a decade at
least – an automatic ban – they would probably still be alive.
Where there is no extreme helpless addiction, career self-preservation is as
strong an instinct in performers as any quick fashionable buzz. It was
wrenchingly sad, and I found myself blaming the industry.
Fry’s humblebrag about his drug days is sad, silly, and may do damage. But not
to him. Let’s hope he’s too old to be a role model to anyone very young.
Visiting Martians, though, might wonder how we built a society where some
get sententiously dragged through the courts for having possibly fondled a
woman’s breasts 30 years ago, yet others stay safe and celebrated when they
openly admit decades of eager support for a criminal trade.
Cocaine: the facts
Cocaine, made from the leaves of the coca shrub that grows in South America,
is a stimulant that increases the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in
the brain, which produces a sense of euphoria
Britain has the highest levels of cocaine use in Europe
The annual prevalence of cocaine use (1.2%) in Western and Central Europe is
nearly three times that of the global average
In 2013/14 nearly one million people in the UK – 3% of adults – used class A
drugs, including powdered cocaine
In the UK, a gram of cocaine costs around £40. In the US, it can be as much as
$155 (£95)
According to analytical data, almost all banknotes in circulation in Britain
are contaminated with cocaine
In 2013, 12.6 % (13,787) of people in the UK undertaking drug treatments were
using cocaine as their primary drug
The number of people in treatment for cocaine addiction in the UK rose from
10,770 in 2006/07 to 12,592 in 2007/08
The third largest group of people entering treatment services in Europe in
2013 were cocaine users
According to the 2013 World Drug Report, a survey of 50,000 randomly tested
drivers in Europe resulted in 0.4% being tested positive for cocaine
The number of deaths caused by stimulants such as cocaine and ecstasy were
shown to have increased, in the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths
Annual Report, in 2013
Helena Kealey
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(via Telegraph)
