Examination of Witnesses (Questions 167
- 179)
TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2009
MS SARAH
GRAHAM AND
MR MITCH
WINEHOUSE
Q167 Chairman: Good morning. Sarah
Graham, if I can just start with you. How did you first start
using cocaine and what was the attraction of cocaine? What impact
did it have on your life?
Ms Graham: Good morning. I had
just recently graduated from university. I had had a very clean
and healthy time at university and I graduated and I was working
in the BBC and pretty much the first night working on a show my
producer and presenter took me to a Soho media watering hole.
I was glad to be there but I was also quite scared by being in
this environment and I had a few glasses of champagne, and I was
asked if I would like to go to the toilet and do some cocaine.
I am ashamed to say that I did not really know very much about
cocaine beyond the hype, beyond the celebrity glamour and success
hype that goes with it, and I unfortunately went to the toilet
and took cocaine and I believe that that changed the course of
my life from that point on.
Q168 Chairman: This is while you
were working for the BBC?
Ms Graham: Yes.
Q169 Chairman: And what kind of impact
did it have on your life when you became a user? For how long
were you a user?
Ms Graham: I used cocaine for
about nine years and it did not immediately impact my life. I
think one of the things around cocaine abuse and around addiction
in general is that people have this perception that an addict
is somebody who is taking a drug 24/7 and that you cannot function,
the stereotype of somebody being on the street not able to function.
I was like many, many young cocaine users and I actually functioned
and I actually functioned at a very high level, and for me my
denial was tied in with cocaine because I saw cocaine as being
part of the successful package. What I did not realise was that
very quickly, right from that first night actually I realised
in rehab, cocaine was starting to impact on me in terms of my
mental health, my physical health, my spiritual health, my well
being and the direction that my life was to take.
Q170 Chairman: So it is both physical
and psychological?
Ms Graham: Physical, psychological,
emotional and spiritual—every area of your life.
Q171 Chairman: Was it possible to
separate your addiction to cocaine from addiction to other drugs
or alcohol?
Ms Graham: I gained insight that
cocaine was creating problems in my life much earlier than I realised
other substances were also impacting on me. I knew that when I
had a line of cocaine I could not just have one line of cocaine;
if I had a line of cocaine the rest of the evening was going to
be taken up with consuming cocaine; I was going to stay up all
night and it was going to end up in a messy place. Other drugs,
alcohol being a major one, definitely my addiction involved alcohol.
In my paper that I have given to you as written evidence I say
that for me alcohol is definitely the elephant in the room, and
for many, many people alcohol addiction and cocaine addiction
do go hand in hand. I realised the problem with cocaine but the
alcohol addiction was very hidden because in society, as we have
heard, alcohol is very prevalent and it is very easy for your
alcohol addiction to not be noticed.
Q172 Mr Clappison: Thank you very
much for the way in which you have spoken to us about this, which
is very helpful. I was just a bit struck by what you told us that
this happened on your very first day at the BBC. Was this something
which was completely out of the ordinary there, or not?
Ms Graham: It was not my very
first day at the BBC; I had worked freelance for the BBC as a
journalist throughout the second year of my university degree
and then I got this job when I graduated.
Q173 Mr Clappison: The first night
of your job.
Ms Graham: It was the first night
of the live show going out and celebrating. It is very easy for
people to assume that everybody in the media is doing drugs and
certainly as a drug user I assumed that everybody was like me.
However, I have been back to those clubs as a sober and clean
person and realised that actually that is not the case. The hype
about drugs is very damaging, especially to young people and their
perception is that all the successful people are doing drugs—they
are not. The reality is that a lot of successful people may be
doing drugs but very soon they will lose their success if they
continue doing cocaine because it does start impacting on you.
Q174 Tom Brake: It was not clear
from what you said whether your producer was the person who supplied
the drug to you.
Ms Graham: I am not going to say
who the person was who supplied the drug to me.
Q175 Tom Brake: You may not want
to talk about that particular instance, but could you tell us
then how readily available it was? Was it something that was obtained
within those media circles or was it obtained from certain pubs
or clubs where you knew that there would be someone there who
was not related to the media but who you could go to if you wanted
a supply?
Ms Graham: What I will say to
you about this is that first of all I take responsibility. I am
not wishing to blame someone else for my addiction; I was the
person who went to the toilet and snorted the drug; I was the
person who did not have the facts about health issues; who did
not know the reality of cocaine, that it is a class A drug and
incredibly addictive and damaging to your health. I did not have
those facts before me and as a slightly drunk person I made a
very bad decision that night. What I will say is that there is
a culture within the media and within the celebrity world that
is very relaxed around the use of cocaine. It is seen as something
that is socially acceptable in certain areas. But I think it is
true of other industries too and it tends to be industries where
people are working very hard, where the work hard/party harder
ethos exists. Certainly some companies that I worked for were
a lot worse than others and it tended to be from the top down—if
you had somebody who owned the company who was a very heavy cocaine
user or if the bosses in the company used cocaine. I worked at
MTV in 1997 and there was very much a kind of cocaine/drugs culture
existing at that time. So as a young person it was very easy to
get pulled into that kind of thinking, that modelling that if
you want to be a top director then that is what you do.
Q176 Tom Brake: Can I just ask, is
that the reason why, because it was so predominant within the
culture, that when you were offered it for the first time you
did not simply say, "No, I do not want to do that"?
Ms Graham: I had low self-esteem.
I was being successful for my age but I had low self-esteem. I
saw these other people doing it; I bought into the showbiz myth
of cocaine being part of the success and I did not look beyond
that stuff. Now cocaine has become a drug that is much more available
across the board. When I first started taking cocaine it was £70
a gram and it is substantially cheaper than that now, so it has
become much more of a mass market drug and many, many people walk
into taking cocaine without realising just what they are getting
into.
Q177 Chairman: Mr Winehouse, you
are in the process of making a documentary about addiction and
drug rehabilitation.
Mr Winehouse: Yes. Can I just
say one thing first of all?
Q178 Chairman: Yes, of course.
Mr Winehouse: The previous chap
who was here—I did not catch his name—as he finished
his remarks he said he does not care what Amy Whitehouse does
at the weekends. If I may I would like to say—and Amy has
been drug-free for a year—why on earth he would need to
come out with a statement like that I have no idea.
Q179 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Unfortunately members of the Committee cannot control what witnesses
say, but thank you for that.
Mr Winehouse: I felt that it was
incumbent upon me to put it right.
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