Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2015
I stopped drinking about 20 years ago, for a number of reasons. I did not like the person that alcohol sometimes made me, although many of my friends did. I recognised that I was struggling physically to cope with the aftermath of a typical Saturday night session and I realised, even at around 40 years of age, that unless I stopped drinking I would never achieve my full potential. I have no doubt that I would not have become a politician and be speaking in the chamber if I was still drinking.
It took me almost two years from the time that I decided to stop to actually stop. What held me back? What was the hardest part of giving up the drink? It was not the going teetotal and it did not relate to the change that drink could make to me—sometimes good, sometimes less so; it was the social pressure to continue to drink. People who did not drink were not seen as one of the lads. The “You think you’re better than us” attitude still prevailed back then. I have no doubt that, if I was in the same situation now, I would find it much easier to give up drink because, thankfully, society has moved on. It is much more socially acceptable to be a non-drinker, and we are all better for it. People no longer have to put up with people saying, “Come on, just have one, it won’t do you any harm—blah, blah, blah.”
I was not an alcoholic. I could have taken a drink or left it. However, I knew that drinking was not doing me any good and that it was not helping me to create the life that I wanted to create for myself. I realised that when I was nearly 40.
Previous speakers, including Mary Fee, have spoken about the damage that is done to retail workers. My partner is a nurse. She works in a neonatal unit, but she used to work in accident and emergency and she tells me that there was never an A and E shift during which she did not get some kind of verbal or physical abuse, almost without fail from somebody who was drunk, although it was sometimes from someone who was on drugs.
As the cabinet secretary said, there is no room for complacency. We spend £3.5 billion every year on the direct and indirect costs of alcohol misuse. We need to get that figure down, but we must do it by continuing to change our relationship with alcohol at a societal level while supporting those who are affected by alcohol misuse.
We know that that misuse affects not only the individual but their family and friends, as well as their community. It continues to be a concern that there is still a huge difference in hospitalisation and discharge rates between the most and least deprived areas of Scotland. That has a knock-on effect in those communities, most prominently in antisocial behaviour that relates to drunkenness, be that general vandalism, antisocial neighbours or the creation of an unsafe environment for people on Friday and Saturday nights. There cannot be an MSP who has not had to deal with constituents’ complaints about neighbours whose drinking makes them antisocial.
Tackling alcohol misuse at a community level is also key to changing our relationship with alcohol. We have heard a lot today about many fantastic organisations that work across the country to help folk who have a problematic relationship with alcohol to get the appropriate support and help that they need in their community.
FASS, which is for families affected by drug and alcohol abuse, is a confidential service that works in my constituency and across Glasgow. It offers support, counselling, advice and information to parents, spouses, partners and adult family members who are feeling the negative impact of a loved one’s alcohol or drug problems.
I visited FASS, which has a project whereby bereaved family members get the opportunity to participate by putting something on to a quilt. The stories on the quilt would break members’ hearts. The squares are made by families who have lost someone close—perhaps a son, daughter, sister or father—through addiction. One family had three squares on the quilt because they had lost three family members to drugs and alcohol.
FASS offers support to kinship carers. That includes practical support, such as helping them to get the right level of access and assisting with paperwork, and it involves working with FASS’s partner, Geeza Break, to offer respite.
FASS runs a clothing project, which started in 2008 and has gone from strength to strength. The original idea of the project was to help kinship carers with clothing items for children who were put into their care at short notice. Many families are affected in such a way that, although there is a long-standing alcohol problem, there is one trigger that brings the services in to protect the children—perhaps there is a death in the family or someone is hospitalised, which means that the children have to be taken elsewhere to be looked after, usually by a grandparent. That service has grown over the years and FASS is now able to offer adults’ as well as children’s clothing.
FASS is one of many organisations and support groups that work across my constituency and the city of Glasgow to help people who have a difficult relationship with alcohol.
One of the most recent ways in which the Scottish Government has taken a lead on alcohol is through lowering the drink-drive limit on our roads, which has been mentioned several times. That change will undoubtedly save lives.