Coked-out City traders head for rehab

Neill Junor remembers the exact moment he decided to quit snorting cocaine. On a chilly December afternoon in 2005, the former equities analyst took a stroll in London's deer-filled Richmond Park to select the tree from which he would hang himself.

The decision to step back from the brink marked the end of a six-year binge of drug and alcohol abuse that had cost Junor his marriage and a career that paid him as much as £1 million ($2.16 million) a year.

He was out of work, having already walked away from both his analyst job at BT Alex Brown and a subsequent position in a dot-com venture. "I burned through everything," Junor says. "I knew there was a choice - and the choice was to hang from that tree or not."

His story reflects the cocaine use that medical experts say is rampant in the City, London's financial district. It's a habit that often goes hand in hand with heavy drinking. Junor says he and his mates wanted to maintain the thrill they felt at work as they poured into the Square Mile's pubs and clubs after a day of getting high on finance.

"It's the same rush from doing a deal and doing cocaine,"

Junor, 45, says. "The adulation from doing a deal spills into going for a beer and then a party - it's an amorphous blob of energy." Everyone knows about the City's drug problem, recovering addicts say. Bosses turn a blind eye to drugs, as long as you're making money for your firm - and until recently, making big money was easy to do.

Professionals in the detox business say bankers have swamped them with calls since the financial crisis widened a year ago. The Causeway Retreat, an addiction and mental health hospital for professionals on a secluded island 64km east of London, has 15 people on the waiting list for its 18-bed facility.

While few walk away from addiction as dramatically as Junor, some bankers are questioning whether the diminished rewards of the City are worth sacrificing their health, says Philip Hopley, a psychiatrist who runs a clinic at the Lloyd's of London insurance building.

"Doing cocaine or drinking heavily is part of the City culture; you work hard and you play hard and you get rewarded because your bonus is fantastic," says Hopley, a consultant at The Priory, a group that runs several mental health centres.

When the bonuses are cut and many of your friends lose their livelihoods, things no longer look so good.

"A number of people now tell me: 'I finally realise what a shit job I have got'," Hopley says. "'If it wasn't for the bonus, I wouldn't be working these hours and I wouldn't be working with these people."'

The number of people in the finance industry coming to see him has jumped by about 15 per cent this year, he says.

Scientists say it's no accident that trading and cocaine sometimes go together. Both involve taking risks and have a similar effect on the brain. Each activity raises dopamine levels, the organ's feel-good chemical, according to Trevor Robbins, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

Dopamine surges when taking risks such as sky diving, betting on stock price movements or hiding in an office rest room and snorting coke.

Studies show that people who take risks have low levels of dopamine receptors and try to shock the brain into a boost of the chemical through novel situations. They're also more likely to become addicted, Robbins says.

Those who don't seek help fast enough can become high-profile casualties.

Drugs and alcohol played a role in the death of Darren Liddle, a 26-year-old fixed-income analyst at Credit Suisse Group in London in September 2007. Liddle, who spent two stints in a psychiatric hospital, went on a cocaine and alcohol binge at the Hilton Hotel just weeks after leaving the hospital for the second time.

He sat on the ledge of his 19th-floor room, shaking and crying, for more than two hours before jumping to his death.

A coroner told an inquest in January 2008 that job pressures might have contributed to Liddle's addictions. Credit Suisse declined to comment on the incident. Liddle's father and brother didn't respond to emails.

"Medical people are absolutely bamboozled by the level of abuse going on in the City and the extreme level of cocaine consumption," says Brendan Quinn, The Causeway's chief executive officer and a specialist nurse in recovery treatment.

"More and more people are coming in, putting their hands up and saying: 'I've got a problem and I need help."'

The spread of cocaine in the City is driven by ample supplies at cheap prices. Cocaine, the glamour drug for jet-setters in the 1980s, has dropped in price to about £40 a gram from almost £70 a gram in 1997, according to figures from the UK Home Office.

The price drop reflects dealers' success in diluting the product and opening up new supply routes, authorities say. The number of cocaine users in the UK has doubled to 1 million in the past decade, according to the United Nations World Drug Report 2009. The UN says British cocaine use peaked in 2007 - the year after City bonuses reached a record £8.8 billion.

While bonuses will plummet more than 60 per cent from that high to £3.2 billion this year, the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research predicts, there's still plenty of money to buy cheap coke.

Some recovering addicts seek help in the company of others secretly struggling with a drug habit. In the wood-panelled vestry of St Michael's Church, a stone's throw from the Bank of England, about a dozen bankers and traders sit around a mahogany table, talking about their addictions. Men in pinstripe suits and women in conservative dresses - using first names only - share stories of the daily challenge of keeping clean.

At least one cocaine user at a financial firm was brazen enough to deal the drug from his desk. David Frith, a 28-year- old banker who worked at Barclays office in Basingstoke, was convicted in 2007 of selling drugs from his desk and received a jail sentence of seven and a half years.

Police listened to Frith's phone calls, which had been routinely recorded by the bank, and tracked his drug runners, according to a police spokesman. Barclays and Frith's solicitors declined to comment.

For some, the only escape from addiction is to quit their City career. Five years ago, Seth Freedman was a 24-year-old private-client broker executing equities trades for wealthy individuals when his coke habit became all-consuming. His dealer would roll up to his office in a station wagon with his latest stash.

"I was buzzing at work because of flickering screens, and I was managing lots of money," Freedman says, as he smokes a cigarette and nurses a glass of water at a pub in North London.

"When the market shuts, how do you keep that buzz going?"

In 2004, Freedman was sitting on the roof terrace of Coq d'Argent restaurant, in the heart of the Square Mile, with both a 30-year-old receptionist and a 16-year-old bottle of Lagavulin single-malt Scotch whisky in his lap. Thanks to the coke in his nose, he felt like the king of the City. Yet he woke up the next morning sporting two bleeding nostrils and a determination to get out of his drug hell.

"I didn't want to be caught up in the vicious circle of money worship by day, hard drugs by night, and little to no structure past the next trade I put on or the next gram I scored," he says.

Instead of checking into rehab, Freedman joined the Israeli Army and in a 15-month tour, he used the enforced discipline of the military to get fit, learn to work as a team member and find a higher purpose than money.

Freedman quit the Israeli Army in 2006, disturbed by his stint in the West Bank, to write a book about his experiences called Binge Trading: The Real Inside Story of Cash, Cocaine and Corruption in the City (Penguin, 2009).

Freedman says City bosses push employees to take a short- term view on both trading and living. "You're encouraged to be a gambler and a risk taker," he says.

Junor, the addict who decided to seek help rather than hang himself, says his addictions thrived in the City. In 1999, he was earning £1 million a year as an analyst at BT AlexBrown. At that point, he only dabbled in cocaine.

"Everyone knew I had a drinking problem when I was in the City," Junor says. "There were a couple of times where I showed up to meetings pissed, but that was Neill."

After Deutsche Bank took over BT Alex Brown in 1999, Junor helped establish the digital unit at Emap. the UK publishing company he had covered as an analyst. He began using coke heavily as he jetted between homes in Los Angeles, London and New York.

"I had a fire in me that was alcoholism and it had an accelerant thrown on it that was cocaine," he says. "Cocaine allows you to keep drinking; it sobers you up." He quit the publisher in 2001 and continued taking cocaine while living in a West London penthouse loft.

"I'd go to dinner parties where the host was chopping up a big line of coke on the cheese board," he recalls. "Cocaine is London's middle-class dirty secret. It's pervasive."

Junor sought treatment in a rehab centre without success. Then he tried yoga and Alcoholics Anonymous, attending 90 meetings in 90 days in 2006. He has been clean ever since.

Salvation came two years ago when he moved to a farm in Dorset to raise free-range chickens for a living. He still wakes up at 6am - only instead of boarding a train, he feeds the chickens raised in white sheds spread across his farm. Junor, who now earns less than £100,000 a year, has remarried and his new wife recently gave birth to a daughter.

Although the major insurers cover rehab programmes at the Causeway and ensure confidentiality, Quinn says clients from the UK's financial sector are reluctant to claim for treatments.

"People won't use their company insurance policy for mental health or addiction for fear that it will go back to their employer," he says. "They go sick for a month and pay for it themselves with no record of it happening."

Moved by the scarcity of treatment choices in Britain, private equity executive Jon Moulton tried to establish a modern rehab facility - an effort thwarted by the credit crisis. In October 2007, his charitable foundation opened Winthrop Hall, a 25-room hotel-style centre in the Kent countryside. Many of Winthrop's patients were from the City: lawyers, hedge fund managers and even the CEO of a major foreign bank who spent a lot of time in the UK.

In January 2009, Winthrop Hall shut its doors as City job losses cut people's ability to pay, says Moulton. The facility wasn't up and running long enough to have treatments covered by private insurance companies.

A company that does not offer help to deal with a drug or alcohol problem could face a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal if it fires someone who has admitted an addiction, says Marco Martinez, a former Salomon Brothers investment banker who checked himself into the Priory in 2000 to treat an addiction to alcohol and codeine.

"The driving force for banks is fear of litigation,"

Martinez says.

"If someone is selling drugs to a mate on the trading floor and the police find out about it, they will go after the people concerned, but they'll also go after the employer."

In the safety of a lunchtime Cocaine Anonymous meeting in St Michael's Church, one woman with a blond bob and a fat string of pearls says she was terrified of attending for fear of bumping into a bank colleague. "Then I thought - who cares? I want to quit my job anyway," she says, echoing the sentiments of ex-City fliers Junor and Freedman.

Those survivors say they're speaking out now to show thousands of anonymous addicts still working in the City that it's possible to escape before going to the brink of suicide.

Although Junor has lost his London townhouse and no longer drives a Porsche, he's regained something more valuable - his life.

- BLOOMBERG