High-flying lawyer’s addiction

America’s opioid epidemic has hit the society’s elite, previously associated with the lower class living in trailer parks and other centres of deprivation.

Ellene Zimmerman’s husband Peter was a lawyer who, as a partner at a top San Diego intellectual property firm, earned well in excess of $1m a year. He was also a drug addict who, by the end of his life, died of organ failure in 2015 aged 51, was intravenously abusing opioids, amphetamines, cocaine, crystal meth.

Zimmerman assumed his odd behaviour was due to stress and overwork  – he was a senior partner at a prominent law firm and had been working for more than sixty hours a week for the last twenty years.

Zimmerman never realised Peter took drugs, and by the time he became addicted to drugs  the pair were no longer living together. Yet as they were parents for two teenagers their lives remained intricately connected, and Zimmerman could not help noticing signs of Peter’s addiction form his dramatic weight loss and erratic driving to his unexplained disappearances and deranged musings about his pet mouse.

“ Stress, exhaustion, mental fatigue, poor diet depression, bipolar disorder and it did not occur to that someone like Peter a highly successful white-collar professional could fall prey to such a foetid habit. She was deeply in denial.

Peter’s proposal contained the immortal line “Why don’t we get married and then you will have health insurance, He turned up to the ceremony over brunch at a hotel in a leather jacket but wearing a tie.

Their marriage exploded mainly due to Peter’s gruelling work schedule. Though an affair with one of his law-school classmates didn’t help. Peter moved into a $2m beachfront house with a  $20, 000 fountain and a $7, 000 dining table while Zimmerman and kids remained in their “one-floor” martial home.

Zimmerman was gobsmacked when she learnt that Peter’s death was drug-related “ We actually see a lot of this now”, the doctor at the scene said  “Wealthy, high-powered executives that overdose and die”.

Zimmerman uncovers most high-powered and remunerative professions in the US – Law, banking, tech appear to be awash with narcotics, People turn to them for numerous reasons to improve focus and performance to bring excitement to their drone-like lives and to cope with the stress of working 100 hours a week.

In Law, the phenomenon is often bound up with depressions, and people who thrive in law tend to have glass-half-empty personalities, and that is why they are so good at anticipating problems,  and also contributes to depression.

One study suggests that 30 per cent of US lawyers are depressed, compared to 10 per cent for the rest of the general population.

Peter’s funeral drew a large contingent from his law firms, and one of them delivered a eulogy that “canonised” their former colleague.

 

Smacked: A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction, and Tragedy by Ellene Zimmerman, Random House $27, 272 pages.