Addiction: England and Wales

Lord Cavendish of Furness Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Cavendish of Furness (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, is to be warmly congratulated on securing this short debate. I thank him for his wonderful introduction and look forward to my noble friend’s response. My interest in addiction dates back nearly 40 years when I had myself to seek help for chronic alcoholism. My experience was much the same as the noble Lord described. I underwent a residential 12-step abstinence programme lasting about 12 weeks. It was known as the Minnesota model and probably still is. I have had the great good fortune to date not to have taken or wanted to take a drink or any other mood-altering substance. Hence, I have no personal experience of other forms of recovery. What I do know is that I still cannot take my own for granted.

What strikes me is how very little has changed in the intervening four decades in scientific knowledge or public understanding of the condition. That leads me to believe that, at the very least, the 12-step model still has a place, not least because of the extraordinary happiness and peace of mind that it confers on those of us who have found sobriety through that avenue. Before recovery, we addicts are notoriously devious, egotistical, dishonest and full of denial, and in most cases have been the cause of untold harm to ourselves and others. Recovery entails confronting that history of damage and those character defects in a process that is inevitably extremely painful. If one can agree that addiction is a disease, the process is not assigning blame but getting the patient to accept responsibility for the past and for their future. I might describe it as a very thorough housecleaning process.

Religion plays no part in 12-step recovery, but there is a critical step that can be described only as spiritual. We come to accept that something larger than ourselves can relieve us of this hateful torment. It works. But that dimension and the confrontational element that I talked about is why I have always believed that the Government are probably not the principal mover in addressing the huge problem of addiction.

Most people understand the misery and sadness that accompanies addiction; they probably have personal experience with somebody they love. Rather fewer people understand the cruel reach of the illness. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, touched on it. For example, without help, the non-addict spouse or loved one of the addict often develops the same insidious and dangerous character defects as the addict. Addiction is a truly complex disease; its nuances are without limit.

What is also understood in some detail is the cost of addiction to the nation and to the economy. It is colossal. Happily, we live in an age of rather wonderful generosity on the part of some of our more charitable and public-spirited large companies. By my calculation, it would pay a company employing, say, 10,000 people to have its own abstinence programme. I could see a way forward where such companies could be given a fiscal incentive to trial such a scheme on the understanding that, if successful, smaller businesses and even individuals could piggyback on to their programme. I should love to develop this theme, which requires rather more than five minutes, if the Minister could spare the time.

I close by saying that the joy I have received through finding sobriety is beyond description. I know that millions more could find the haven that, by good fortune, I found. To that end, I believe that a partnership between business and government to tackle this hideous problem should not be ruled out.