Monday, October 8th, 1984

Pete launches his anti-heroin crusade with an interview in The Times called “My crusade to beat the drug menace.”

 

Transcript:

My crusade to beat the drug menace

Tomorrow rock star Pete Townshend of The Who, a cured heroin addict, addresses Young Conservatives at the Tory Party Conference. Bryan Appleyard reports

“Heroin is the pursuit of oblivion — that’s what it’s all about.” Pete Townshend began that pursuit in 1981, 18 years after the formation of The Who, a rock band which made its name with the celebration of joyous, nihilistic, youthful destruction.  Throughout that period he was surrounded by junkies and, to some extent, he still is.  But, until 1981, he never felt the need.

“My brush with heroin was actually connected with an alcohol problem”, he explains.  “People always seem to end uo with heroin after passing through other things.  In my case it was alcohol.

“I wanted to stop drinking and I was prescribed a drug called Ativan, a slightly hypnotic anti-depressant.  Its effects are remarkably similar to heroin.  I became very interested in those little blue pills because I realized that by carefully overdoing it with them I could not only stave off depression and jitters but also feel very good.

“After six weeks it stopped working. I started to take higher and higher doses. Well I was enmeshed in a very druggy crowd at the time so it was fairly simple for me to find something which prevented me emotionally falling to bits  - and that was heroin.  It was very cheap. I began smoking it - I believe smoking is the most instantly addictive.  It’s such a pervasive, ritualistic experience.”

After a brief flirtation with the drug in 1981 Townshend shook the habit by traveling to California to be treated by Dr. Meg Patterson, a specialist in drug treatment.  He had helped with her work in the past.  It involves the use of electrical signals transmitted into the brain which appear to reduce craving and anxiety. Within 20 days he was back in London and off the drug. 

His belief in Dr. Patterson’s methods led him to write to Mr. Norman Fowler, Secretary of State for Social Services, and three months ago he met Fowler and his junior minister, John Patten.  Clearly impressed by Townshend’s extensive medical and social knowledge about the effects of drugs, Patten invited him to speak at a Young Conservatives meeting tomorrow at the Tory Party conference  - a strange venue for a confirmed socialist who believes that Conservative policies are partly to blame for the scale of the drug problem in Britain.

“It’s not a problem you can separate from other problems. In this society oblivion is one of the only ways you can find balance because everything seems so frantic, so dangerous.  With a right-wing government everything also seems so uncaring.  People tend to become absorbed in their own emotional and physical feelings. Most people go to the pub and get wrecked and that’s what I did until my liver more or less gave out.  I needed these moments of oblivion and when that stopped working I needed to find something else.”

But there are twists and turns on the road to oblivion.  Townshend is convinced that the heart of the heroin problem lies in the number of misunderstandings about its physical and psychological effects. For one thing he points out tht, whereas alcoholism is fairly uniform inits effects, heroin’s impact differs  widely from one individual to another.

So he is impatient with suggestions from some journalists that becoming addicted is quite difficult.

“It can be uncomfortable to begin with because you’re sick quite  lot but you don’t really feel anything. I think the real point is that if you’re 15 or 16 withdrawal isn’t so bad because you’re healthy and strong. So you go back.  And each time it gets worse until finally it’s so bad you can’t get off, you’re so physically emaciated. When you use heroin you don’t feel the need to keep yourself healthy.

“I thought I was going to end up dead.  It seems to be an end-of-the-road thing. In my case it was absolute desperation. It was a futile hand-in-the-air gesture.  I couldn’t do anything to feel good any more. I couldn’t even drive from A to B.

“And remember the rock business is privileged in one important respect - you can earn a living in any state.  Someone will make sure you get on that stage - someone will be watching to make sure you don’t die.”

Townshend associates his decline into nearly-terminal alcoholism and heroin with a sudden feeling in the mid-1970s that he had lost his grip.  Until then his status in the pop world made him a feared (???) figure.  He was not just a musician , he was a spokesman for the band and for disaffected youth.  But when punk came along he noticed the rock journalists suddenly talked to him differently - he was no longer at the top, a new generation had superseded him.

The crisis arose at a party in New York. He was drinking steadily when he noticed that everybody vanished to the lavatory to take their cocaine.

“I just thought this is ridiculous, I’m actually missing out because I don’t use drugs, I made an absolute positive decision to use drugs again, “ Cocaine, alcohol, Ativan and heroin followed.  

But with the help of Dr. Patterson he pulled out of the suicidal decline. He now lives and works in Twickenham and has two daughters aged 15 and 13.  he is utterly convinced they and their friends are safe because of his experience and knowledge. 

“I can spot a junkie from a mile off, he says and lists three key areas of symptoms:

• Nodding off. Sudden short, deep sleeps and inability to maintain interest for periods
• Yellowish skin and dialated pupils
• Difficulty holding food down in early stages of addiction combined with a seemingly healthy appetite.  Also a general decline in well-being through the day.  By the evening early users often appear to have mild flu

And this is his first recommendation to the Young tories tomorrow.  He wants to see parents, teachers and children thoroughly educated to recognize the symptoms — “It makes me confident about being able to help other addicts.  If you can recognize an addict you can allow them for the first time in their life to tell the truth. If you’ve had to resort to that kind of drug there’s something you haven’t been able to talk about.  Every junkie has to lie.”

His second demand is more treatment. He sees only two ways: brutal detoxification programmes involving confinement and excercise.  The later is, he reckons, an underrated aid in the whole process.  

Secondly there’s Dr. Patterson’s methods which, he is convinced, will ultimately be available as a matter of course from GPs

Dealing with supply is, he believes, virtually futile.  The drug is now an international currency, used by terrorists, full-time dealers or casual-emigrants wanting to start off with plenty of cash in a new country.

Apart from a love-hate relationship with tobacco and an addiction to coffee, Townshend is now drug-free.  Yet he remains obsessed with the subject.  He declined to become involved with a recent campaign against younger pop stars against heroin but with the kind of access to government circles he seems to enjoy, he is clearly able to do more while making less noise about it.

There is one final irony in his case which demonstrates the strange twists and turns involved in any drug-influenced biography. 

He is convinced heroin saved his life.

“This is probably the most controversial thing I’ll ever say about heroin. If I hadn’t become a junkie I would not have gone to Meg Patterson and if I hadn’t done that I would be dead.  I would have crashed my car, gone back to alcohol, combined with tranquilizers - all the standard ingredients of the drug/alcohol cocktail death story”