'I earned £500,000 a year, and spent £30,000 on cocaine'

'I earned £500,000 a year, and spent £30,000 on cocaine'

By Catherine O' Brien

PUBLISHED: 18:01 EST, 5 May 2012 UPDATED: 18:32 EST, 5 May 2012

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As a successful City broker with a devoted husband and three young children, 'Emma' seemed to have the world at her feet. But behind the glossy façade lay a secret drug addiction that threatened to destroy everything…

'Within weeks, both drugs were part of my daily ritual: cocaine in the morning to boost me up, and Xanax before I left the office to calm me down'

If you were to meet me at the gate of my children’s school, you’d assume I was the archetypal yummy mummy. I bake, sew and volunteer as a reading assistant in one of the infant classes.

After pick-up at 3.30pm, I do the usual to-ing and fro-ing between tennis, swimming and piano lessons. Once a week, however, I step outside my middle-class bubble and head for a community centre about five miles from my West London home

There, in a basement room, chosen for its cheap rent and discreet location, I spend a couple of hours talking to around 15 strangers.

For me, Monday is Cocaine Anonymous (CA) night and it’s a fixture as rigid in my diary as my children’s birthdays.

Among the current regulars at my meeting are a plumber, lawyer, nurse and market-stall holder.

Several others live on a local council estate and without CA I’ve no doubt they would be sucked back into the gang culture from which they came. Superficially, we have nothing in common; deep down, we know exactly what makes each other tick. We are all recovering addicts.

For me, there is no hard-luck story to explain the £30,000-a-year habit which five years ago brought me to the brink of suicide.

I was once a City broker earning £500,000 a year. I have a devoted, successful banker husband and we live in a spacious five-bedroom period house. No neglect, poverty or tragedy marred my upbringing, and yet for as long as I can remember I felt odd.

According to CA, there are two types of addicts â€" those who were normal until their first line of coke and those who felt they were abnormal until they became users. I fall into the second category.

Now 47, I grew up in the Home Counties with my policeman father, secretary mother and elder sister Polly. Polly was a good girl who was later diagnosed as dyslexic. I was the clever one who was an inexplicable handful. Mum recalls having to stop me from banging my head against my bedroo m wall when I was about four. Asked what I was doing, I apparently said: ‘I’m just trying to get these thoughts out of my head.’

My mind was like a washing machine â€" constantly whirring. I lied to friends about holidays we had been on and the cars we had. I can’t tell you why â€" I just didn’t feel I could be myself. My reports were terrible.

One teacher wrote: ‘Emma will always have problems in life.’

During my teens, I was wildly promiscuous. After losing my virginity at 14, I fixated on boys â€" I saw sex as a way of making them like me. But, in other ways, I was a model of restraint. Back then, I was never tempted by drink or drugs â€" I didn’t like being out of control.

I had my first serious breakdown at 19. After spending a year as an au pair in France, I returned home rudderless. I felt myself sinking and drove around in my battered Allegro resisting the compulsion to smash it into a wall.

One day, I called m y dad at work, rattled a bottle of pills down the phone, and challenged him to come and get me before I swallowed them. He rushed home to find me rocking back and forth saying: ‘I just want to be normal.’ Much to everyone’s relief, after a short spell in a psychiatric hospital, I recovered. 

Life was good after that. I got a job in advertising where the work was all about flirting and putting on a façade. I excelled at both. I still had no interest in drink or drugs.

My friends envied my ability to have a good night out on one glass of wine and said I was the least addictive person they knew.
Finally, at 28, I tried some cocaine. I had a new boyfriend and did it because he encouraged me. It was a nonevent â€" the drug did nothing for me.

A year later, I felt that sinking feeling again â€" for no discernible reason, I was having another break down. When I found myself fantasising about jumping from the window of my seventh-floor flat, I called my parents and they came for me. My doctor prescribed antidepressants and, once again, I recovered.

At 31, through a friend, I got a job at a broking firm in the City. I was out of my depth when it came to understanding the financial markets, but 80 per cent of the job was entertaining customers and I was good at that. There were lots of drinks parties and dinners and trips to Monte Carlo in private jets. It was a mad, hedonistic world â€" and one that I quickly learnedwas fuelled by cocaine.

Over lunch, Kate, one of the few other female brokers, asked me, ‘Do you..?’ and pointed to a small bag of white powder in her handbag. I told her, ‘Yes, sometimes,’ thinking it was the cool thing to say. Every so often, we hosted client parties. My boss would say: ‘Can you get ten grams, because everyone will expect it.’

I knew where to go â€" Miguel in the car park sold it. It was at one of these work parties that I met my husband, James. He wasn’t into drugs â€" he’s the straightest man I’ve ever met.

Quite why he wanted to marry me, I couldn’t tell you, but he says he knew the moment he set eyes on me. We married when I was 34. Unbeknown to James or anyone else but my friend Kate, I took cocaine at our wedding. Stupidly, I believed it would help control my nerves.

At that stage, I would still have described myself as a recreational user. My main focus wasn’t drugs, it was starting my family before it was too late.

Our first daughter Stella was born in 2001 and Beatrice arrived two years later. After both births, I went back to work within ten weeks.

On my return after Beatrice was born, there was a new female broker 14 years younger than me on our desk. Her presence made me feel fat, old and depressed. I didn’t seem to fit in at work any more, I wasn’t a great mother and I was constantly exhausted. I had a couple of panic attacks and one of the guys noticed I was jittery.

He gave me a tranquilliser called Xanax and it completely chilled me out. When I asked him for some more he gave me a wrap of coke instead. I went to the loo and took that, and the combination â€" a bit of up, a bit of down â€" was absolutely divine.

I saw the Xanax/cocaine combo as my lifesaver. Within weeks, both drugs were part of my daily ritual: cocaine in the morning to boost me up, and Xanax before I left the office to calm me down. My husband had no idea. He was working abroad a lot by then. And at that point, our marriage wasn’t great â€" I had become stressed and irrational and we were barely communicating. In 2005, I gave birth to our son L uke.

Again I rushed back to work, but I was reaching breaking point. One weekend, when Luke was six months old, I had to take some clients heli-skiing in Chamonix. I came back wrecked from 48 hours of alcohol and cocaine overload and told my boss, ‘I can’t do this any more.’ When he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I picked up my bag and left.

Unbeknown to my husband or anyone else, I took cocaine at our wedding

My thinking was that if I became a full-time mother, I’d cure my coke habit. I sacked the nanny and it took three days for my plan to unravel. I had never been home alone with my children before â€" I didn’t know what to do with them. I called an agency for some temporary help, but still had to manage the school run.

It was impossible for me to get the children dressed and breakfasted before 8am so I’d give them chocolate bisc uits and ice cream to eat in the car. At the school gate, I was agog. The other mothers looked so unfeasibly together in their designer jeans and barely there make-up. I couldn’t possibly compete.

So I did the next best thing. I started doing the drop-off in my gym kit, giving everyone the impression that I was on my way to work out. I didn’t even belong to a gym. By 11am, after my mother’s help had arrived to look after Luke, I would be taking my first line of coke in the bathroom. I couldn’t function without it.

My supplies, which by then were ten grams a week at £60 a gram, came from the dealer I’d always had. He’d deliver to my home and we’d have a doorstep chat about our children â€" his were similar ages to mine. It was very civilised â€" the last thing I wanted was to give him the impression that I was in trouble.

But actually, I really was. Where at work, cocaine had made me feel in control, at home it made me feel wretched. I shudder at the near misses I had that year.

Once, when I hadn’t even managed to provide an in-car breakfast, we stopped at Starbucks on the way to school. I dashed in for muffins and cookies, leaving our automatic people-carrier in neutral instead of park.

Moments later, Stella came running in â€" the car, with Beatrice and Luke strapped in, was rolling into the path of oncoming traffic on the main road. I flew out and stopped it within seconds of a major accident. Another day, while coked out of my head, I was pushing Luke on a park swing while chatting distractedly to my dealer on the phone. Suddenly, Luke was flying through the air â€" I’d pushed so hard, he’d come out of the seat. Mercifully he was all right, but he so nearly might not have been.

Nine months afte r I finished work, the madness truly descended. My children deserved better. They needed a different mummy. I couldn’t leave them â€" because that way I would have to exist without them which would have been too painful for me. So
I thought, ‘I’ll have to die.’ It was the only thing left to do.

My dealer would deliver to my home. We’d have a doorstep chat about our children

One night, I put them to bed and sat down at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine and several packs of painkillers. James wasn’t due home till late evening. We were no longer sleeping together so I reasoned that he wouldn’t find me till morning and he would be there to look after the children when they woke. I was psyching myself up to take the pills when I heard the front door open. My neighbour, who is also a friend and has a key to our house, had had this sixth sense that she should check on me. As soon as she saw what I was trying to do, she called my parents.

The rest of that night is a blur. I remember Mum and Dad arriving and wrapping me in a blanket. They had no idea I had been using cocaine, but I couldn’t go on pretending any more.

The following day, Dad took me to see a psychiatrist who said I needed rehab.I checked into the Priory and a week into my treatment, James and I started talking.

I told him everything and he was amazing. I had feared that he would take the children away from me, but he said: ‘Why would I do that? They need you.’

A few days later, he brought them to see me and I couldn’t believe I had so nearly abandoned them. James and my parents did what is known as the family programme, which involves exploring some tough questions about our relationships.

I felt so sa d for what I had put them through, but together we began to understand some of the reasons behind my addictive behaviour. The anxiety and depression that had made my life complicated and difficult for so long were part of a chemical imbalance in my brain. But with the right treatment, I realised everything was going to be OK. The only drug I take now is a low-dose antidepressant that keeps my anxiety attacks at bay.

After checking out of the Priory four weeks later, I went to CA meetings every day for a year.

Gradually, I have reduced that attendance to once a week, but those meetings are my lifeline.

Later this month, I will also be joining more than 1,000 recovering addicts attending the CA World Service Convention which is being held in the UK for the first time. It’s a chance for us all to listen to speakers, attend workshops and share our stories.

CA will always be part of my life because, although at home I am surrounded by people who love me, the only people who can truly understand addicts are other addicts.

And we recovering cocaine addicts are of a particular type. Cocaine is a power drug â€" it attracts go-getters with big egos but low self-esteem. We become hooked on cocaine because it makes us feel omnipotent, but we are a constant reminder to each other that that power surge can never last.

Today, I look upon my addiction as the best thing that happened to me. My children, who are now 11, nine and seven, have some memories of ‘pre-recovery’ Mum and one day I’ll tell them the whole story. But our relationship is fantastic and they’re remarkably unscathed.

James and I don’t have the perfect marriage, but we have an honestly imperfect one and love each other deeply. Everything has changed because I am no l onger living a lie.

Now, when I turn up at the school gate in my gym kit, I really am going training. I’ve become a marathon runner. It’s my new addiction â€" but thankfully, not one that will kill me.

Cocaine Anonymous World Service Convention, 24-28 May, Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel. See cauk.org.uk for details

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