The bubble has burst for UK coke survivors
Diminished rewards give London City fliers pause
October 11, 2009
By Stephanie Baker and Thomas Penny
The decision to step back from the brink marked the end of a six-year binge of drug and alcohol abuse that by then had cost Junor his marriage and a career that paid him as much as £1 million (R11.8m) a year. He was out of work, having walked away from both his analyst job at BT Alex Brown and a subsequent position in a dotcom venture.
"I burned through everything," Junor says. "I knew there was a choice - and the choice was to hang from that tree or not."
His story reflects the cocaine use that medical experts say is rampant in the City, London's financial district. It is a habit that often goes hand in hand with heavy drinking. Junor says he and his mates wanted to maintain the thrill they felt at work as they poured into the Square Mile's pubs and clubs after a day of getting high on finance.
Everyone knows about the City's drug problem, recovering addicts say. Bosses turn a blind eye to drugs, as long as you are making money for your firm - and until recently, making big money was easy to do.
Professionals in the detox business say bankers have swamped them with calls since the financial crisis widened a year ago. The Causeway Retreat, an addiction and mental health hospital for professionals on a secluded island 64km east of London, has 15 people on the waiting list for its 18-bed facility.
While few walk away from addiction as dramatically as Junor, some bankers are questioning whether the diminished rewards of the City are worth sacrificing their health, says Philip Hopley, a psychiatrist who runs a clinic at the Lloyd's of London insurance building so that he can be in the neighbourhood where his patients work.
"Doing cocaine or drinking heavily is part of the City culture; you work hard and you play hard and you get rewarded because your bonus is fantastic," says Hopley, a consultant at The Priory, a group that runs several mental health centres.
When the bonuses are cut and many of your friends lose their livelihoods, things no longer look so good.
Feel-good Rush
The number of people in the finance industry coming to see Hopley has jumped by about 15 percent this year, he says.
Scientists say it is no accident that trading and cocaine sometimes go together. Both involve taking risks and have a similar effect on the brain. Each activity raises dopamine levels, the organ's feel-good chemical, according to Trevor Robbins, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Dopamine surges when we take risks, such as going sky diving, betting on stock price movements or hiding in an office rest room and snorting a line of coke.
Studies show that people who take risks have low levels of dopamine receptors and try to shock the brain into a boost of the chemical through novel situations. They're also more likely to become addicted, Robbins says.
Those who do not seek help fast enough, like investment manager Melvin Sabour, can become high-profile casualties.
Sabour, a managing director of AKN Investments, died of a cocaine overdose in February. Sabour was depressed over losses at his privately held firm, his girlfriend Kyara Dekker told an April inquest into his death.
A post-mortem examination found that Sabour had a lethal level of metabolised cocaine in his blood and attributed his demise to drug-triggered heart failure.
"Cocaine can and does have a bad effect on the heart and it is quite a significant cause of death in men of younger age in this area of London," coroner Paul Knapman told the inquest that determined the cause of Sabour's death.
"Medical people are absolutely bamboozled by the level of abuse going on in the City and the extreme level of cocaine consumption," says Brendan Quinn, The Causeway's chief executive and a specialist nurse in recovery treatment.
The spread of cocaine in the City is driven by ample supplies at cheap prices. Cocaine, the glamour drug for jet-setters in the 1980s, has dropped in price to about £40 a gram from almost £70 a gram in 1997, according to figures from the UK Home Office. The price drop reflects dealers' success in diluting the product and opening up new supply routes, authorities say.
The number of cocaine users in the UK has doubled to 1 million in the past decade, according to the UN's World Drug Report 2009. The UN says British cocaine use peaked in 2007 - the year after City bonuses reached a record £8.8 billion. While bonuses will plummet more than 60 percent from that high to £3.2bn this year, the Centre for Economics and Business Research predicts, there is still plenty of money to buy cheap coke.
Some recovering addicts seek help in the company of others secretly struggling with a drug habit. On a rainy day in July in the vestry of Saint Michael's Church, a stone's throw from the Bank of England, about a dozen bankers and traders sit around a table, sharing stories of the daily challenge of keeping clean.
Escape Plan
One equities salesman and recovering addict says the greatest challenge comes at the end of a workday. "I could take you to four or five pubs a few minutes from here, walk up to the bar and buy a pint and a gram of coke," says the man. "If you continue using, you become suicidal."
For some, the only escape from addiction is to quit their City career.
Junor, the addict who decided to seek help rather than hang himself, says his addictions thrived in the City. "I had a fire in me that was alcoholism and it had an accelerant thrown on it that was cocaine," he says. "Cocaine allows you to keep drinking; it sobers you up."
After quitting his jobs, he continued taking cocaine while living in a West London penthouse loft.
"I'd go to dinner parties where the host was chopping up a big line of coke on the cheese board," he recalls. "Cocaine is London's middle-class dirty secret. It's pervasive."
Junor sought treatment in a rehab centre in southwest London without success. Then he tried yoga and Alcoholics Anonymous, going to 90 meetings in 90 days in 2006. He has been clean ever since.
Salvation came two years ago when he moved to a farm in Dorset, southern England, to raise free-range chickens for a living.
He still wakes up at 6am, but instead of boarding a train, he feeds the chickens raised in white sheds spread across his farm. Junor, who now earns less than £100 000 a year, has remarried and his new wife recently gave birth to a daughter.
Breaking the Silence
Although the major insurers, such as Aetna, Axa and British United Provident Association, cover rehab programmes at The Causeway recovery facility and ensure confidentiality, Quinn says clients from the UK's financial sector are reluctant to claim for their treatments.
"People won't use their company insurance policy for mental health or addiction for fear that it will go back to their employer," he says. "They go sick for a month and pay for it themselves with no record of it happening."
In the safety of a lunchtime Cocaine Anonymous meeting in Saint Michael's Church, one woman says she was terrified of attending for fear of bumping into a bank colleague.
"Then I thought - who cares? I want to quit my job anyway," she says, echoing the sentiments of ex-City flier Junor.
Those survivors say they are speaking out now to show thousands of anonymous addicts still working in the City that it is possible to escape before going to the brink of suicide.
Although Junor has lost his London townhouse and no longer drives a Porsche, he has regained something more valuable - his life. - Bloomberg
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