FAVOR SA Director Jacques Joubert shares his story...
 THE
STORY OF THE HOTEL CALIFORNIA:
One summer's night in 1995, I walked into the Havana Night club in Waterkant Street, Cape Town. My marriage over, I was on the run, looking for the excitement of a new beginning. I was 35 years old and about to find the parallel universe of the Hotel California, ignoring the warning sign in the hotel's foyer: "You can check out but you can never leave."
I headed straight for the DJ in a dark corner of the club. He was my
connection. A few years before, shortly after being admitted as an advocate
of the High Court, I had defended him in a criminal case. He was found
not guilty and I became an instant hero in his eyes. He praised me so
much that, my ego inflated, I waived my professional fee.
He excitedly invited me, his 'celebrity' lawyer, for a quick visit to an outside alley and presented me with a fine line of cocaine. My nostrils flared eagerly, like a virgin's on heat in the soft evening breeze. He deftly rolled a US dollar and showed me how to snort the cocaine up my nose, the shortest possible route to my brain.
I was a pro from the start and within seconds after that first line,
whatever inner turmoil, whatever doubts, anxieties and insecurities I
ever had, miraculously disappeared. And so I checked into the Hotel California,
for a honeymoon with cocaine.
For a while at least, perhaps for about one year after the Havana introduction, the cocaine seemed to work for me. I quickly embraced my new role amongst my peers as a person of 'substance' on substance. A much favoured guest, I would arrive at parties and other functions with a few grams of cocaine in my wallet, ready to impress and impress and impress.
Never before had I felt more accepted and respected. With a wink and
a smile I became, or thought I had become a Pied Piper of note, playing
a seductive tune for a mixed bag of lost souls, grand intellectuals and
eccentrics in Cape Town. My circle of friends expanded over night, and
my using accelerated almost as fast.
Of course I wasn't a dealer, I told myself, merely a facilitator of Colombian marching power for borderline addicts with money to burn.
My dealer was falling over his feet to please the advocate whom he thought
could crank up demand for his wares. Assisted by my professional status
and the reckless abandon of my emerging addiction, I helped to make cocaine
more socially acceptable amongst some of my peers.
I became a master of rationalisation, brushing away any guilt about
the real and potential harm I was causing them and their families.
I am approached by someone higher up the supply chain. He wants me to supply cocaine in my well heeled circles. I discuss his offer with someone who knew the game. "Isn't strange", I ask him, "that an advocate with a bright future at the Cape Bar would consider taking the risk to be a drug dealer?"
I still hear the truth of his answer ringing in my ears: "Perhaps it is stranger that you do not want to take the real risk to see whether you are able to become an accomplished advocate." Thankfully I declined the offer to join the 'big league' or this story may have included a spell behind the walls of Pollsmoor Prison.
After two years of ever-increasing use, my tolerance for the chemical
effect of cocaine developing, the drug gradually started to lose its transformative
properties. My honeymoon with cocaine was over but unlike some users who
are perhaps less prone to addiction, I refused to accept this loss.
I continued to use relentlessly, at the expense of my physical health, and to the detriment of my financial and professional circumstances. My denial system at full tilt, I could not acknowledge the harm I was causing myself and others. I blamed everything and everyone for my miserable situation, from poor quality cocaine to attorneys who were 'mysteriously' giving me less work than before.
Another day stands out from the blur of memory: I'm at my dealer's house,
watching her snorting a line of brown powder. Like many frontline dealers,
she too is an addict, selling drugs to support her all-consuming habit.
I immediately ask her what it is. 'Heroin,' she responds casually. 'Do
you want a line? I'm going to regret introducing you to this.'
I needed no further encouragement to use the drug known to be 1000 times
more effective a painkiller than morphine or any other painkilling drug.
(Heroin was developed by a German scientist about 100 years ago. His lab
assistant experimented with the drug and said afterwards it made her feel
like a heroine, and so the drug was named.)
Heroin's legendary seductive properties lie in the fact that the drug
relieves not only physical pain but also emotional pain and distress.
Wow, what a bonus! Cocaine had made me feel as if I mattered and when
it stopped working, heroin would make me feel as if nothing mattered.
Insanity prevailed and I swiftly concluded that heroin would help me stop
using cocaine!
Heroin swallowed what was left of my soul and soon, in the words of
a twelve-step fellowship, I lived to use heroin and used heroin to live.
Getting and using became the only reason for my existence and I was unable
to imagine a day without heroin. My practice as an advocate became more
of an illusion than anything else and I withdrew from family, friends
and colleagues, all the while silently blaming them for withdrawing from
me.
Another vivid memory: I'm standing in a queue with an assortment of
desperate people, hoping to secure a loan from a micro lender in Adderley
Street. I weigh 55 kg for my 1, 80 m frame and am wearing a somewhat tatty
somewhat expensive suit. The micro-lender assesses me as too much of a
credit risk. I am incensed but quickly rationalise that they have turned
me down because they suspect I am a special undercover agent investigating
irregularities in their money lending business.
Chemical dependency led me to dependency on others for my daily survival
and I moved in with my parents, vowing time and time again that I would
turn my disintegrating life around.
I decide to first stop smoking cigarettes and see a hypnotherapist
in Kenilworth. She is unable to help me and I casually remark that perhaps
I should stop using heroin first. She nearly falls off her chair. Here
is someone dying from heroin addiction trying to give up smoking Camel
filter.
She recognises that hypnotherapy could not help me at the stage I was
in and plants the seed that a twelve step fellowship may be able to. Nearly
eighty years earlier Carl Jung told an alcoholic, one of the founder members
of AA that he was unable to help him.
This act of humility by Jung saved the alcoholic's life and gave rise to the twelve step programme, a simple programme in which alcoholics and addicts help each other stay clean and sober.
My attempts to stop using, or more accurately stated, to stay stopped, failed until I had a simple experience of humility and surrender. It happened in Nature's Valley on the Garden Route during December 1999.
The previous millennium drawing to a close, humbled in paradise where Knysna Loeries flash their red brilliance next to ancient yellow wood trees, I realised just how desperate my situation had become. Swaying on my haunches on the wooden deck of my parents' holiday home, I admitted for the first time that I needed help. I could not recover from addiction on my own.
This recognition of my powerlessness in the face of my addiction, I
would discover later, is the first step in the empowering journey of recovery
from addiction.
After three weeks in a Cape Town treatment centre I became a member
of a twelve-step fellowship, a fellowship that importantly lays no dogmatic
claim to be the only solution available for people suffering from addiction.
(I will never feel comfortable to belong to an organisation claiming to
be the guardians of The Way.)
Recovery has not been easy but in January this year I celebrated seven
years in recovery and have a thriving and successful career as a lawyer,
no longer too afraid to take the risks success demands. I have, like many
others before and after me, received the gift and the power of recovery
from a disease from which there is no known cure.
No longer trapped in the parallel universe of the Hotel California, many people in recovery are helping bury the old lie that "once a using addict, always a using addict."
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