The real Cousins unmasked Patrick Carlyon
Herald Sun
November 12, 2010 6:34PM Video:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/the-real-cousins-unmasked/story-e6frf7l6-1225952839167DRUG addicts don't normally boast the deep tan and designer clobber of the bloke in front of you.
They don't talk about the 6km run they itch to tackle as soon as the interview has ended.
Their stubble isn't crafted.
The white of their teeth doesn't offset the green of their eyes.
They do not stand to be confused with models lifted from the set of an aftershave commercial.
This drug addict does.
Ben Cousins wants you to know he's just a "normal bloke with flaws".
He speaks of business "opportunities" away from the football world.
He wants out of the footy fishbowl, at least for a spell.
He loves living in Melbourne, which isn't claustrophobic like Perth.
There may be a new romance, although, as with the opportunities, he's not gushing with details.
Life's pretty good, he declares, gazing over the boats on Perth's Swan River from the second storey of his parents' home.
It became simpler once he grasped and accepted he had an extreme drug problem.
At least, finally, life could be something more than a smoke and mirrors act.
Yet there is a catch.
It dates back to the age of 17, when he took two ecstasy pills, and stared at the stars, and decided that drugs were terrific.
Part of Cousins still thinks they are.
The spectre of his well documented addiction has not dimmed.
Drugs remain at the nexus of his thinking, 15 years after he sat on a kerb and first marvelled at chemical euphoria.
All indications suggest they will for some time yet.
He remains vulnerable, he says.
His illness demands "permanent vigilance".
His family, it seems, believe Cousins faces many challenges before his emotional attachment to drugs will be confined to the past.
He cannot say for certain that he will not relapse.
If only the psychology of his addiction was that simple, he says.
He readily offers up this admission.
Other mysteries, such as the number of days or weeks or months he has been clean, are not for public airing.
He doesn't need strangers keeping count for him.
And the rumours - such as the whisper about his supposed demise just last Sunday - will perpetuate whether he is sober or not.
Yet Cousins does describe the train wreck he was. The lies to protect his habit. The plots intrinsic to the pursuit of his diabolical lifestyle.
For 12 years, Cousins smashed his body with illicit chemicals whenever he could get away with it - and sometimes when he could not.
It's the first obvious paradox, and just one of many seemingly illogical intrigues that swirl around the sportsman who prided himself on being fitter than any opponent.
The second paradox is more subtle.
Cousins refuses to disown all aspects of his drug-fuelled past, despite its ravages, even though he knows the public might expect him to.
He ventures to say that simplistic slogans, such as "drugs are bad", can be unhelpful when young people first encounter drugs.
He says his own drug experiences nurtured some good amid the overwhelming bad.
"Never once do you hear growing up, especially when you're pretty young, that there are actually some things about drug use that people get a lot out of," he says.
Cousins' view is shaped by his own anti-drugs stance as a child.
He tried pot at about 13 and didn't like it.
Yet the heavier stuff featured in his thinking from the time he donned West Coast Eagles colours, all clear eyes and cheeky grin at 17.
This contradiction - the clean look and the dirty habit - has not faded.
"It's never far from my mind, unfortunately," Cousins says of using drugs.
"That's the nature of where I'm at and that may change going forward ... (although) I think the fear of not using, and the fear of the future without drugs, is not quite as daunting as it has been in the past."
Cousins has never before offered such a raw insight into his drug preoccupation.
Throughout his career, as hints of his double life became more and more pronounced, he hid behind that smirk.
What others saw as smugness, he describes as his "nervous twitch".
He turned on the smirk when, high from a full day of smoking crack or ice pipes, he turned up at the airport for his 2007 trip to LA and rehab.
It wasn't far away when he apologised for his drug-addled behaviour in a television statement, a gesture he now dismisses as patent insincerity.
The smirk lurked when he turned up for an AFL hair drug test with a marine-style crewcut to erase the evidence of drug use in the months beforehand.
It was always there when he disembarked from the plane after interstate matches, abuzz in red wine and Valium, and routinely stumbled through the airport like a drunken Thunderbird.
Today, Cousins has put the smirk away.
He has no need for it.
He doesn't want to hide all things any more.
He jiggles like a tea bag at the dining room table.
He strums the table top with his fingers and looks at his phone a lot. Cousins was always a kid who couldn't keep still.
He yawns and sighs. He lapses into slang asides and can go vague when a question doesn't appear to interest him. Yet his answers are mostly generous and considered.
Cousins is willing to field questions about five-day binges and the time he nearly choked on his own vomit after passing out from heavy use of methamphetamine.
He will spell out how he lost his dignity and his mind - like the time he was convinced the police were tracking him through his television set.
He is ready to out not a spoilt brat who went too far, but instead the junkie he grew up to become.
"It was madness, what I did - madness," he says. "As you get older, you understand the fragility of life, and I was playing Russian roulette.
"I am the luckiest person I know. I could have been locked up. I could have overdosed."
Cousins may not qualify as a sympathetic figure.
He's never been forthcoming enough for that, not until now, anyway.
But his story is a sad one.
It's difficult to identify a single moment that best captures the Cousins saga.
His new book, Ben Cousins: My Life Story, offers a score of terrible tales.
Any one of them, in isolation, would have prompted front page headlines and public hand-wringing.
In the book, Cousins talks about the weird symbiosis of drugs and football, the training and "getting on" drugs, that were equally fed by a singular obsession that he says stems back to childhood.
The reward for training hard was the drug session, sometimes spilling into next week.
The damage of such drug sessions, in turn, motivated him to train hard for the coming game.
It's a rationalisation - what he calls a "go hard, don't hesitate" mentality - that may defy the imagination of those people unfamiliar with the extremes of addictive psychology.
Somehow, Cousins blended both pursuits for more than a decade.
He even embraced the constant battle against anxiety and paranoia - caused by the residue of chemicals in his system - as part of his unusual program.
He argues his drug use never jeopardised his on-field talent, even though he admits his close friends were baffled by his unerring ability to play well.
He never used performance-enhancing drugs, he says, besides the caffeine and Sudafed hits that many players once employed.
Cousins claims that football was always his first priority.
Yet by the time the Eagles suspended him indefinitely at the start of 2007, having just played two best-on-ground performances in pre-season matches, his need to get out of it had snuffed his thrill of the game.
Cousins had just played the two best years of his career. His silken hands, and that instinct for being where the ball landed, earned him a Brownlow Medal in 2005. The Eagles won the flag the next year.Cousins floated as a football star of a generation.
Yet his public rise reverse-mirrored his private descent.
By 2007, Cousins' support mechanisms had, understandably, begun to dissolve.
His girlfriend, Samantha, would leave him. His parents and family agonised when he went missing for days on end.
The smirk that had shielded him from scrutiny was not enough to combat the emerging glimpses of his drug-fuelled reality.
Cousins deceived people as all addicts do. He was also lying to himself. "The intensity of it, the juggling, you get addicted to that," he says.
"You probably don't realise until you are actually removed from it, and you sit down and take a couple of deep breaths, and you go 'F---, that was hard work'."
For years, Cousins had hunched up to coffee tables, alongside drug-using mates, barely moving except to rack up another line of cocaine or pack another ice pipe. He wouldn't sleep for days.
If mates dropped off, exhausted, he would badger other mates to join him. Cousins prided himself on being an endurance player.
These excesses were contained to after matches, or at the end of year when he would indulge a two or three-month twister.
Yet after the 2006 grand final win, the self-imposed controls had frayed.
The previous Christmas Day, his mother had busted Cousins smoking an ice pipe down the side of the house.
At the lunch table, his eyes had rolled back in his head.
He had embraced the scary rush of crystal methamphetamine, which offered him manic efficiency, energy and, he says, clarity - until the wiring of his brain started to break down.
This was usually four days or more into a binge.
In early 2006, the public got a hint of his troubles.
Cousins ran away from his Mercedes, leaving Samantha and others in the car, when confronted with a late-night booze bus in Perth.
He jumped fences, scaled roofs, scampered through back yards and dived into the Swan River.
He tried to cover it up, but would lose the Eagles captaincy.
His father Bryan had seen enough. In coming months, Bryan would trawl pubs and nightclubs late at night to drag Cousins home before he hurt himself.
Sometimes, Cousins would wait until his father drove away, and return to where he had been.
Cousins says he abstained for months before the 2006 grand final.
After the win, Cousins spent sleepless nights on his Perth balcony, listening to music and smoking pipes of crack cocaine.
Why didn't he stop?
"I turned them into positives," he says now of his escalating issues.
"They became the motivational force behind training hard and tightening all the screws and getting back to playing better footy than I ever have."
Did he realise he was falling? "Maybe subconsciously."
Yet the ritualised bravado of his football approach also applied to his drug use.
Cousins told himself to throw out his chest, to go hard, and to go fast.
To hesitate was to be weak.
His 2006 form appeared to have temporarily lent him an untouchable air. As far as he knows, he never officially tested positive in an AFL drugs test (he was well drilled in the technicalities of drug detection).
But surely people must have known?
"I think it was the worst-kept secret in footy," he says.
"I think the AFL knew. I think everyone knew."
Cousins argues his circumstances were unusual. No club or league had faced problems such as his in the past.
His twister took him to Sydney where, in one drug session shared with a Penthouse pet, a fellow user fired a gun for fun.
Cousins continued to use drugs in the 2007 pre-season. He turned up to training haggard, then missed a morning session.
Perhaps it was this moment that best sums up the Cousins' trajectory.
He was in a chemical haze when coach John Worsfold called him in. He was suspended.
Cousins bumbled out and quietly rejoiced.
In under an hour, he figured, he could again be out of it on drugs.
He went hard, too, spreading his time between strip joints and a recording studio where no one would find him.
He watched his father's public appeal to him on the TV news - while smoking crack cocaine.
The plea didn't slow him down.
Even then, Cousins tried to rationalise his behaviour as that of a larrikin on the tear.
It wasn't until he was bundled off to rehab, against his will, that he grasped the significance of the problem. Until then, he believed he'd hurt no one bar himself.
Cousins has relapsed many times since his rehab stay in Malibu.
But the four-week stint did shift his thinking.
He arrived off his face.
He was there only because he was told he wanted to be - if he hoped to play football again.
"For such a heavy drug user, I was very naive when it came to the concept of addiction," he says.
"I had been so functional. I was holding down everything. Then it just unravelled very quickly.
"But I was probably living with the condition for years."
He learned to accept the label of addict, which he had for so long rejected.
"I have friends of mine saying, 'I hate you using the word addict about yourself.'
"(But) it saves my dancing around the subject and I think the way we use words like addict will only become far more prevalent and less frowned upon."
Cousins was diagnosed with ADHD - though he argues that every second person seems to get lumped with the condition.
More importantly, he learned to face up to self-delusion that fostered the extreme lengths of his drug-taking.
He confronted his illness. "A lot of the time, it's about being honest with yourself," he says.
"Sometimes you can bulls--- yourself and when you do that and you don't really know you're doing it to yourself, life can come along and give a little slap."
Rehab may have quashed the sense of carefree abandonment that accompanied Cousins' drug taking.
It slowed his spiral, certainly. But it didn't stop him taking drugs.
