'My mother gave me an allowance for hash'

Old Etonian and former drug addict Cosmo Duff Gordon hails from privileged and somewhat notorious family. His great-great uncle and namesake, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, was vilified as the ?Coward of the Titanic? for escaping in a lifeboat as the luxury liner sank. The sister of a great-great aunt was the erotic fiction writer Elinor Glyn who inspired the doggerel: ?Would you like to sin/ With Elinor Glyn/ On a tiger skin?? Another ancestor broke her neck and died after riding a bike while drunk. His mother, Grania Villiers-Stuart, a former Chanel model, was an alcoholic whose addiction overshadowed Cosmo?s early childhood.

?I?d wake up in the morning and there would be jugs of Buck?s Fizz and lots of vodka in the fridge,? he reveals. ?I was very used to helping myself to booze. I grew up with the hedonistic awareness that rules are for other people.? Later, his drug of choice was heroin, spending 15 years in the grip of a habit which earned him a criminal record and threatened to destroy his life.

Duff Gordon, 43, has been ?clean? for nearly a decade and is putting his past to good use. Now a qualified counsellor and published writer on addiction, he is also the brains behind a new outpatient programme for high-functioning (and usually wealthy) addicts. The Start2Stop clinic, which operates from a discreet mews in Kensington, west London, enables cash-rich, time-poor addicts of drugs or alcohol to get intensive treatment out of working hours, without needing to reveal all to bosses, colleagues or even spouses.

Clients of the 100-day programme, which costs �5,000, have so far included hedge-funders and bankers.

?Start2Stop is for those halfway down the addiction slope, who still have marriages and jobs,? explains Duff Gordon, who trained as an addiction counsellor in South Africa, where he also underwent his own rehab. The clinic, of which he is chief executive and clinical director, bridges the gap between residential rehab, such as that provided by the Priory, favoured by stressed-out celebrities, and less intensive one-to-one sessions with a therapist,

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568409/s/1a0f6173/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Chealth0C88842340CMy0Emother0Egave0Eme0Ean0Eallowance0Efor0Ehash0Bhtml/story01.htm

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