IT took no less than the late great Ian Ramsay QC, Howard Hamilton QC and Patrick Atkinson to convince a 12-member jury to acquit the 34 year-old architect of murder in the summer of 1979. It was a sensational case. A bar full of witnesses heard him threaten to shoot one of his best friends hours earlier and later when it happened, no one was around to corroborate his claim that the gun went off by accident. The fact that he was drunk wasn’t highlighted — according to Hamilton, that would have resulted in an inescapable manslaughter conviction.

But the man who walked away from the dock of the Morant Bay Courthouse — to which the case was transferred at the request of the lawyers — was not free. The memory of the friend he shot dead in what the legal trio proved was a drunken accident and the pain of another in the series of divorces he was to go through by the time he was 50, made sure of that.

And in the 17 years that followed, he found himself imprisoned by what health officials have come to regard as one of the cruellest jailers — alcoholism — one of the most chronic diseases of the 21st century.

Statistics coming out of the National Council on Drug Abuse (NCDA) last year show that one in 17 persons had a problem of alcohol abuse or dependence on alcohol in 2001. The results, taken from a sampling of 2,380 individuals, was used for the purpose of comparing the various effects of the disease.

The symptoms of abuse in a sample of 125 persons showed that 72 per cent continued to drink despite social and inter-personal problems, 36.8 per cent drank recurrently in potentially hazardous situations, and 2.4 per cent drank recurrently despite neglecting their roles and obligations.

As far as symptoms of dependence were concerned, 43.2 per cent exhibited tolerance — that is, the ability to drink without showing getting drunk. Ninety-four per cent experienced withdrawal symptoms — sweating, nausea, panic attacks — whenever they stopped drinking, 36.5 per cent consumed larger amounts of alcohol over a longer period of time than intended, 35.1 per cent were unsuccessful in their efforts to cut down and control the use of the substance, and 70.3 per cent gave up or reduced important activities.

The subject of this report could well have been a participant of this survey. For, in addition to his friend’s life, alcoholism would cost him a 30-year career which peaked at the level of assistant general manager in one of Jamaica’s oldest financial institutions, four wives and a financial fortune. In 1983, four years after his acquittal, he gave in to the demands of a nagging wife and checked into the Nuttall Memorial Hospital near Cross Roads in Kingston for two weeks in an attempt to kick the habit, but started drinking again when he came out.

He continued to drink until 1992, a year after a policeman’s bullet killed his son, a drug addict.

“I stopped for three and-a-half years. I was what you would call a ‘dry drunk’, but all the time I was scheming and conniving and planning when I was going to have the next drink. I knew when it was going to happen and when it did I went right back to square one,” he said.

Square one, in a nutshell, was a pathetic scenario in which he polished off two to three quarts of liquor — Scotch, and when that became too expensive, white rum, the cheaper alternative — per day.

On February 5, 1996 he decided to kill himself.

It was about mid-day. “I walked to the far end of the Hellshire beach, sat down, cleaned my gun, put it to my head and pulled the trigger…nothing happened…I was in such a drunken stupor that I had forgotten the magazine. It was back at the house holding down the suicide note. At that point I began to laugh. I said to myself, ‘you’re so screwed up you can’t even kill yourself’,” he recalled.

He walked back home and telephoned a doctor-friend who took him straight to the University Hospital of the West Indies’ psychiatry unit, Ward 21. He was admitted to the hospital’s Detoxification Unit instead — the fact that he had called for help caused the authorities at Ward 21 to rule him out as a suicide case.

In detox, he spent 28 days on a programme which required him to attend Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), a support group that meets every night at the Stella Maris Church and the Sts Peter and Paul Church in Kingston.

“I remember it well, they told me that if I wanted to beat the disease I should return to the detox unit by nine the following morning. The following morning I went to Papine and polished off a quart of white rum, then I went to the detox unit.

From there I went to AA. It was my turn…I got up and said ‘my name is Tony. I am an alcoholic’.”

The admission opened new doors for him, for the first time he began to learn about the disease and identify with other persons who had it. “It’s the same for everybody…the consequences…the devastation.”

Today he’s celebrating seven years, six months and 11 days of sobriety.

However, the disease to which he became susceptible from as early as age five when he began to drink beer at the pool halls which his father used to frequent in the parish of St Mary, still hangs over his head.

“Trust me, I still feel like taking a drink. And that feeling is as strong as the day it first started. My palms get sweaty, my stomach starts going into knots, I start to feel nauseous. That’s when I start to pray and I call someone from the group and we talk, sometimes for hours until the symptoms go away,” he said.

Insomnia, another consequence of the disease, forces him to get up between three and 4:00 am each day. Between those hours and 6:30 am when he goes to work on a construction site till eight at night, he reads, prays, watches television and occasionally goes on a bird-shooting expedition at his ranch miles away from Kingston in the rurals of Portland.

“I go to the site where I spend the day and when I get home at nights I have dinner and go to bed…then it’s up again by three or four…that’s my life now,” Tony said with resignation.

Consequently, he doesn’t know if he can marry his current girlfriend. “I’m petrified of the commitment and now that I’m a work-a-holic I don’t know if my lifestyle will be compatible with marriage,” he said.

Still, he’s thankful and with good reason, for, according to health professionals, alcoholism is one of their biggest challenges in terms of the enormity of its incidence and the inadequacy of the facilities available to treat it.

“One of the biggest challenges regarding the disease is the fact that alcohol is so socially acceptable. It is used for celebrations…people drink when a baby is born, to celebrate a promotion etc and, on the other side of the spectrum it is used as a means of escaping from problems. People drink when they are under pressure,” said Michael Tucker, the executive director of the NCDA.

“I don’t have the data to support an increase in the incidence of alcoholism, but with the advent of all-inclusive parties at which alcohol is freely available to young people once they pay the cover charge, the problem has been exacerbated,” said Sonita Abrahams of the Addiction Alert organisation.

Tucker and Abrahams agreed that the solution lies in a comprehensive combination of early education comprising the teaching of life skills, as well as co-operation on the part of the companies that distribute alcohol.

It is, according to Tucker, an ongoing process which has reaped some concessions in terms of the warnings that accompany the advertisements promoting the use of alcohol.

“You will see warnings to drink responsibly and to use a designated driver in the relevant circumstances. However, there is still a far way to go… What we would like to see ultimately is a situation in which some of the profits earned from the sale of alcohol are ploughed back into the treatment and rehabilitation of those it has harmed,” he said.