According to new government figures, around 12m people in the UK drink hazardously

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According to new government figures, around 12m people in the UK drink hazardously – over the recommended guidelines of two to three units a day for women and three to four units a day for men, the equivalent of two to three small glasses of wine a day. Over 800,000 people (four times the estimate 10 years ago) are hospitalised in the UK annually because of alcohol-related illnesses and accidents, at a cost of £2.7 billion. Around 600,000 underage Britons are estimated to be drinking alcohol recklessly and illegally. Pressure groups, like the Alcohol Health Alliance, blame the government’s liberal drink policies, especially the availability of alcohol 24/7 from many supermarkets. Yet immediate access to alcoholism treatment is available for only five in every hundred alcoholics (one in a hundred in the northeast). And there’s no dedicated budget for alcoholism. Contrast that with the UK’s 300,000 drug users, whose treatment access is virtually 100%, with a budget this year of £600m. This access mismatch, in the view of specialists and GPs, reflects the perception that alcoholism is largely the responsibility of those afflicted. As a result, according to a survey conducted by Mori and a London teaching hospital, a third of Britain’s GPs are encouraging alcoholics to detox by themselves at home without professional help. Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, warns of the dangers of unsupervised detoxes. “It’s hazardous, and things can go badly wrong,” he says. “In any case, detox is just the first step on a long rehab journey requiring professional help.” Colin Drummond, professor of addiction psychiatry at the Maudsley hospital, south London, echoes that warning: “A detoxed person is like a car without wheels; it’s the weeks and months of follow-up counselling and talk therapy that matter. And self-detox is dangerous.” So what are the dangers? There are no hard figures for detox deaths. They melt into the 20,000-plus alcohol-related fatalities in the UK each year: deaths caused by everything from liver failure to road accidents, from brain seizures to suicides. The detox hazards lurk within a set of arcane percentage stats. According to data provided to The Sunday Times Magazine by Professor Drummond, about 20% of patients with high alcohol consumption will have epileptic fits, or seizures, on a detox withdrawal. This proportion is considerably higher in people, like Tom, with many previous detoxes as well as severe alcohol dependence. Of those who have seizures during detox, about 3% progress to a prolonged epileptic state lasting 20 minutes or more. This in turn carries a mortality rate of 20%. About 5% of patients in alcohol withdrawal also develop delirium tremens, which can be fatal in about 35% of cases if untreated. A further claimed danger involves brain damage due to a lack of thiamine, vitamin B1, during detox. “Hence it’s dangerous,” says Professor Drummond, “to expect a severely alcohol-dependent patient to self-administer, or an untrained relative or friend to oversee, withdrawal drugs without medical supervision.”