The real dry life

AS PAUL Gascoigne announced yesterday that he was "never going to drink again", Derek Rutherford, director of the Institute of Alcohol Studies, said that the physical process of drying-out - ridding the body of alcohol - takes a week to 10 days.

But that is only the start of the recovery sequence. "It is then that the problems occur," he said. "The most difficult part is coming to terms with not drinking and adjusting one's lifestyle. That is when counselling and therapy are needed, and when a caring, supportive environment is essential. The reason why so many people relapse is because of social pressures."

Mr Rutherford, former director of the National Council on Alcoholism, said that a fortnight was a brief stay in a residential programme. "For a person who has had a real physical dependency on alcohol, that appears to me to be a short time in which to have overcome the psychological and social problems.

"People who have dried out have to face the world and reality, and the reality is that we live in a drinking culture.

"The question I would ask about someone who has come out of a programme so quickly is: is he psychologically and socially ready to go back to the `wet' culture that helped to produce his problem?"