Lying in a hospital bed, 24-year-old Stacey Rhymes cuddles a childhood toy before putting out an arm to her mother.
‘Hold my hand, Mum,’ she whispers, then slips into a coma. A few hours later, on a spring afternoon earlier this year, the girl with a whole life ahead of her was dead.
The once radiantly pretty Stacey had drunk herself to death on cut-price bottles of wine bought from corner shops, supermarkets and local pubs. She had started drinking at 17 and seven years later her body simply gave up under the constant assault from alcohol.
Her mother, Louise, says: ‘I now want the world to know exactly what happened to Stacey and why. It was a terrible way to go. ‘Her stomach was like a balloon, as if she was nine months pregnant. Her long hair was falling out, her urine was coloured black and she could not eat. She was scared to look in the mirror because her eyes were canary yellow. The only way to stop the pain at the end was morphine.’
The story of Stacey Rhymes is a salutary one. She is one of the youngest people in modern Britain to die of alcohol abuse. And her mother, speaking for the first time, is determined that the loss of her daughter will not be in vain.
She has set up a Facebook website in memory of Stacey to highlight the dangers of alcohol – and particularly its increased availability following New Labour’s 24-hour drinking laws – which now kills more young women than cervical cancer, and more people, generally, than hard drugs.
A film clip about Stacey on YouTube, put there by her mother, has been watched by 16,000 people in a fortnight. It is now one of the most viewed in Britain by children and teenagers.
At the family’s terrace home, in Bramcote, on the outskirts of Nottingham, where Stacey grew up with her brother, Jay, now 19, sister Katie, 21, and stepfather, Terry, her mother says: ‘Alcohol is as treacherous as a Class A drug. Yet it’s available at all hours and at rock-bottom prices.
‘This morning, I saw a pack of four cans of lager at the supermarket for 92p. You can’t get four cans of children’s pop for that! Young children should be warned about alcohol in the way they are warned about drugs. ‘I want them to be shown a photograph of Stacey’s face when she was dying. She was killed by alcohol – a drug that is as easy and cheap to buy as a packet of sweets.’
Since the relaxation of licensing laws in November 2005 – which allowed round-the-clock sales of drink in pubs, clubs, shops and supermarkets – the cost to the nation both socially and financially has been huge. Coupled with low prices for alcohol, there is now an orgy of drunkenness that rivals the gin epidemic of early Victorian times.
The facts are stark. The numbers dying from alcohol-related health problems is rising. In 1999, there were 4,000 deaths. Today, the figure has doubled, with the age of the victims going down, too. Hospitals admit for emergency treatment more than 9,000 drunken teenagers every year.
According to Alcohol Concern, 800,000 children below the age of 15 drink regularly in Britain. Nearly two-thirds of them will have had alcohol in the past month – with one in seven consuming enough to make them sick. One in three think, it is acceptable to get drunk once a week.
Campaigners say that one in ten eight-year-old boys (double the figure ten years ago) and a quarter of 11-year-old girls (ten per cent more than in 1995) have also experimented with alcohol. Staff at the casualty department of Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool will not be surprised by these statistics. A survey by the hospital – which admits only under-17s – showed that more than half the children treated after binge-drinking had bought their alcohol from a pub or a shop.
Nearly three-quarters of patients are girls, and the favourite tipple is vodka. Every week, seven or eight drunken youngsters are treated at the hospital – a quarter so ill that they have to be put on a ward or go into intensive care.
According to Pat McLaren, an Alder Hey spokeswoman: ‘They come in on a Friday and Saturday night in particular. Some are found unconscious on the street or even beaten up. We get them sober and contact their parents. We try to get them to change their ways.’
Alder Hey and Liverpool are not alone. Cases of liver cirrhosis in 20 to 30-year-olds – who often started drinking as children – have doubled in less than a decade. Eight women in Britain die each day from liver disease – often at ages younger than men with the same condition because their bodies are more sensitive to alcohol poisoning.
As Professor Ian Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Physicians, warns: ‘The damage to society from alcohol is greater than from drugs.’ Dr Gray Smith-Laing, a gastroenterologist at Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, says: ‘The young of all social backgrounds think it is cool to get completely legless, yet nothing could be more uncool. This is a classless and sexless phenomenon. We have not seen the peak yet.’
Young women such as Stacey Rhymes make up half his caseload. Some have irreversible liver damage from drinking. One woman of 26 he treated recently died of liver cirrhosis. Dr Smith-Laing says: ‘We need a dramatic rise in the price of alcohol so it is no longer affordable for the young.’
It is against this frightening background that Stacey’s mother has bravely decided to speak out.
She reaches for a pile of treasured childhood photographs. They show Stacey on her first birthday; at eight in a white hat at a family wedding. There is one of her with bright, clear eyes and long thick hair smiling at the camera - she is just 17, and it is a few months before she began to drink.
Louise, 43, says: ‘Stacey had a wonderful childhood and we were a close family. There wasn’t a lot of money, but we did old-fashioned things. We went to the park for picnics and walks around Nottingham. ‘She had lots of friends and when she left school at 16, she got a job in a local pub as a waitress. She met a boy, and there was even talk of an engagement.’
But things were soon to change. ‘For no apparent reason, Stacey began to drink. She had arguments with the boyfriend about it. She lost the job she loved and her boyfriend, too. She was just drinking all the time. She became foul-mouthed. She stole money from us, her family, to buy the alcohol,’ says Louise. ‘Stacey would go out drinking at night then lie in bed all day. I couldn’t get her up, even though I tried before I left for work.
‘In the end, we found her a housing association flat in Nottingham, where she moved. We thought it would be a fresh start.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.
‘Stacey then got in with a bad crowd. Her friends were all drinkers, too. She would lie in bed with a bottle. A few times, she burned the bedclothes with her cigarettes. She got involved in a serious brawl, and was sent to prison for eight weeks.
‘We were horrified, but she came out looking far better. She had not been able to drink while inside. We took her back to her flat where there were eight weeks – £800-worth – of giro cheques from the benefits’ office. Stacey spent every penny on drink. She was evicted from her flat due to debts on the rent.’ Stacey wouldn’t move back home because her mother and stepfather, a self-employed builder, refused to allow her to drink. Revolted by what alcohol had done to their daughter, they are now teetotal. Instead, Stacey found a place at a hostel in Derby, five miles from Nottingham. ‘That lasted five days before she was thrown out for drinking,’ recalls her mother.
By now, her life was out of control. For a time, Stacey lost contact with her family. She lived rough in Derby. In desperation, Louise tried to get her daughter sectioned under the mental health laws so she would be taken into hospital. ‘But the authorities said she was quite normal, just an alcoholic.’ she recalls today. Stacey was now drinking five litres of wine a day and some cider, too. She no longer dressed fashionably, put on weight and didn’t eat properly. ‘Her stomach was huge and she was very ill,’ her mother says.
On March 28 this year, Stacey was admitted to Derby Hospital – to Ward 308 which deals with alcohol-induced liver problems. She had been to her GP because her face had gone yellow and she was having trouble walking because her limbs were swollen. The doctor told her to go to hospital immediately - it took her a week to do so.
Dr Jan Freeman, a consultant in whose care she was put, says: ‘Stacey was at the end of the road. She could have been saved only by a liver transplant. Like lots of young people, she never thought it would happen to her. Well, Stacey’s death shows it can happen to some.’ There is no doubt that Stacey was well looked after in the hospital but, during the next seven weeks, until her death on May 22, she managed to discharge herself three times and return to drinking.
Once, she walked out in her pyjamas, hailed a taxi then disappeared. Derby police put out appeals for the public to look for her. Her parents searched, too. He mother recalls: ‘We got her back to the hospital on each occasion. The last time was on May 17. She had been staying with a drinking buddy. She rang up saying she was being sick and it was streaked with blood. Her skin was itching, a symptom of alcohol poisoning.
‘I knew that we would lose her, because of her colour. I thought she wouldn’t make it over the weekend. But three days later, she had picked up and told us she was scared of dying. I told her that if she stopped drinking, she would live.’ It was, of course, a white lie. The next day, the hospital rang Louise to say Stacey had a hole in her stomach, caused by acid from a ruptured peptic ulcer. There was nothing more the doctors could do. Within 24 hours, the family were called to the hospital for the final time. Stacey died in her mother’s arms of abdominal bleeding and alcohol-related liver disease.
As confirmation of Stacey’s tragic story, Nick Sheron, a liver specialist at Southampton General Hospital and secretary of campaign group, Alcohol Health Alliance, says drink-induced liver disease – once the preserve of middle-aged men – is affecting all ages and both sexes.
He explains: ‘If they are alive, it is never too late to stop drinking. But, often the symptoms show up so late that half the patients die before they have a chance to change their ways.
‘In the Sixties and Seventies, wine used to be nine percent proof, now it is 13 percent. Beer was 3.2 percent, now a lager is five percent. The size of a wine glass is bigger, too - from 125ml to 175ml, and in some cases 250ml. That is a third of a bottle.’
Dr Sheron warns that alcohol is being used as a drug, instead of a part of a social event or accompaniment to a meal. ‘The young drink to get wasted as quickly as possible. They think if they can remember the night before it is not a good night out, and 24-hour licensing is one of the problems,’ he cautions.
With prices so low, Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Department of Public Health at John Moores University in Liverpool, adds: ‘A young person with £10-a-week to spend can get drunk three times a week.’ The scale of the crisis cannot be over-stated. Alcohol abuse, leading to either injury or disease, now costs the NHS £1billion annually with 40 per cent of casualty departments’ admissions being drink-related.
Significantly, the London Ambulance Service says that alcohol-related emergency calls have increased by 12 per cent since 24-hour drinking laws were introduced. As spokeswoman Anna Lowman says: ‘One of the aims of the new laws was to eradicate the 11pm to 2am disorder flashpoint when the pubs and off-licences used to close. But this is still our busiest period. Fourteen per cent of all calls during these hours are linked to drinking.’
Yet this is not the only catastrophic side-effect. The Cabinet Office admits the real cost of drinking is £20billion a year if you include suicides, alcohol-fuelled crime, anti-social behaviour, depressive illness, family breakdown and domestic violence.
Only this month, the Local Government Association – representing councils – warned the 24-hour drinking plan to emulate a European style cafe-culture in Britain had failed miserably. It costs £100 million a year to oversee the late licensing system, provide staff to clean town centres of vomit or urine (often both) and help for the ‘walking wounded’ at the end of a night’s hard drinking.
At Stacey Rhymes’ funeral in Bramcote, held near the park where the family used to picnic, there were 150 mourners – some were her old school friends. As her mother says: ‘Stacey chose her way – and they theirs. They have got married, have children and careers. They are enjoying life. My daughter drank herself to death. ‘She never had any problems getting her hands on another bottle. In many ways, she was a victim of our times.’
Source Newspaper cutting – sent to NDPA not identified.
