THE FOOTBALL STAR... WHO’S ALSO A CRACK ADDICT
FOOTBALLER Paul James has spoken of the secret double life he lived as both top flight coach and crack addict. The Welsh-born star, who played for Canada in the Mexico 86 World Cup and in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, spent more than a decade using with no one in the game suspecting.
The 53-year-old recalled height of his addiction being:
ROBBED by a thug who held a knife to his throat;
WAKING up battered and bloodied in need of 17 stitches; and being
FORCED to hand over cash after taking drugs in a crack house.
Now the former TV pundit and newspaper columnist has announced he is beginning a hunger strike this month having lost “absolutely everything”.
Paul, from Whitchurch, Cardiff, became a Canadian citizen in 1983 and earned a move to Mexican side Monterrey in 1985, having developed into a quality midfield player. He had one stint in England, when he played for Doncaster Rovers in 1987-88.
He began his spiral into addiction after trying crack after a night boozing. Within 10 years he went from trying it once to using every day.
He remembered once getting his fix after watching an EnglandArgentina game at Wembley.
“I was hours away from using and I at the knew I was going to use,” he said.
“You cannot imagine what is going on in your mind. The person I was with did not know I was about to use crack cocaine.
“I needed serious assistance at that time and serious help and support.”
He left for Kings Cross. He should have caught a tube and gone to his hotel – instead he ended up in a crack den.
“I ended up in a house, because I was always so paranoid about being found out, I would end up in these houses and go on sessions,” he said.
“At the end of the night a person said I owed them money for being there.”
He was taken to a cashpoint and forced to hand over cash to a woman.
“In that situation you are so malleable that people can take advantage of you,” he said.
Another night he was in the Canadian city of Saskatoon.
“In Saskatoon I went to a 7/11 store and I had an overwhelming urge to use,” Paul, who lives in Toronto, said.
“I asked someone there and we went to a house that was full of people.
“I basically got mugged when I went to pay for it. I was in territory where I did not belong and I had no idea what I was involved in.
“There was a Stanley knife to my throat. He said ‘give me your wallet’ but there was nothing more in there from what I had given them already. It was scary.”
Ten weeks before coaching Canada at the Fifa 2001 World Youth Championships he found himself in a daze on Toronto’s Queen Street.
“I fell out onto a street at 5am and I was covered in blood,” he said.
“I jumped in a taxi and said ‘take me to Oakville’ where my sister lived.
“She paid the cab and I stayed there.”
He had a number of cuts to his face having “walked into a wall”.
“I had 17 stitches put in my face and head,” he said.
To the outside world nothing was wrong.
“From 1998 to 2008 I went from using in one isolated incident to using on a daily basis,” Paul, a member of the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame, said.
“And that was the most successful part of my professional career.”
In 2003 he was hired by Canada’s York University as a coach.
Paul said in six years he helped the school win local and national titles – something York Lions had never done.
He decided to tell colleagues of his habit and took three months off to recover in rehab.
On returning he found he had been replaced as coach. He resigned in 2009.
Three years later he took York to Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. He argued his resignation was forced because of “discrimination and harassment”.
His claim was rejected on the grounds it was out of time. Paul appealed but that failed, too.
Then in January this year he went on hunger strike. In a video message he told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that people with drug problems needed to be treated with the “dignity and the respect and quality and the fairness we deserve”.
His habit and legal battles have drained Paul’s savings.
He said he is penniless and homeless.
“I have lost absolutely everything,” he said.
Paul is bracing himself for a “final” hunger strike that will start on March 15.
“It is in protest to the extreme injustice and abuse I have faced over the past eight years living as a Canadian citizen trying to live as a normal person with a mental disability,” he said.
“While I am apprehensive of the impending pain of the total starvation approach, I counter-intuitively do not fear the prospect of dying, which at this late juncture looks inevitable.”
He claimed Canadian society was “devoid of an ounce of integrity, nous, compassion and guts” because of its failure to implement “the right approach” to help the drug addicted.
He feared there was “no hope for sustained improvement of helping those in desperate need”.
“I am living, breathing proof of a shameful system of colluded, wilful incompetence facilitated through political weakness and judicial impropriety,” he said.