Hidden behind paywall I’m afraid. Was interested to see what prolonged affects it may have had. Banging lines at 90 has to leave some footprint!
Pensioners aged 90 and over are being admitted to hospital after taking cocaine. Ten nonagenarians were admitted with mental disorders “due to the use of cocaine” last year, compared with two a decade ago, NHS Digital figures reveal
A decade ago, 45 people a year aged 60 or over were treated in hospital in England for cocaine-related disorders. The number treated has soared to 379.
Experts say the rise in the number of older people taking drugs and ending up in hospital was due to existing users living longer, the increasing purity of the drug as well as falling prices.
Dr Emily Finch of the addictions faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists described the rise as “deeply worrying”.
She added: “Many people don’t realise that cocaine use can cause mental health problems, resulting in people becoming so unwell they need to be admitted to hospital.”
There has also been a stark rise in admissions for cocaine-related mental health disorders among people in their fifties. The numbers treated are up by more than 800%, from 160 in 2008-09 to 1,460 in 2018-19.
Karen Tyrell, from the drug charity Addaction, said: “We need to shift the narrative to let people know that it’s OK to ask for help or support at a much earlier stage.”
But cocaine is addictive, and regular cocaine use can change the way the brain releases dopamine, a chemical that makes people feel happy.
Idiots…they’ll never live to see 100
A few of them must have tipped into Bingo Loco by mistake and got hooked.
I’m hearing a lot about this Bingo Loco. Seems to have really taken off in the last few months.
I haven’t been to one but I hears it’s a grand auld night of debauchery. Shots, prizes and glow in the dark dildos - that kind of thing.
Whatever you’re into I suppose.
Hell of a drug.
A few years ago above in Scotland wasn’t there a whole village right across the generations all on E?
Honestly never heard of him
Not dark enough
‘I was hallucinating. The police came, and I went to the door with knives’
By Oliver Kay 4h ago
13 
“I’m usually quite… concealed,” Marcus Bent says, his eyes narrowing. “I don’t tell people much about my life.”
He pauses, briefly settles back into the sofa and then moves forward again. “But I feel like I need to tell people what happened, why it happened, where I’m going,” he says. “Because I feel like, if I didn’t, people would be thinking, ‘Is this guy okay? Should we be around him?… Drugs?… Knives?’”
Another pause, a much longer one this time. That word “knives” hangs in the air. “I think a lot of people stepped back from me for a while,” he says. “But now I need to open up about everything I’ve been through. I think people will appreciate that more.
“I wake up with anxiety every day. I was worried about this interview. ‘What’s he going to ask me? How do I talk about it? What do I say? Can I be truthful?’ but I’m here now and all I can be is honest. So don’t hold back. Ask me anything you want.”
Around the height of his powers, in late 2001, Bent went to withdraw some money. He had recently joined Ipswich Town from Blackburn Rovers, which brought signing-on fees, loyalty bonuses and a big new contract. “I went to the cash machine and there was £300,000 in my bank account,” he says. “What age was I? I must have been 22. Three hundred grand. At 22.
“I didn’t spend it. I just kept looking at it. I used to go to the bank and type my number in and go, ‘Oh my god. Three hundred grand. I’ve come up from a council estate in Shepherd’s Bush and… look at that’. That’s when I met my agent and my accountant and put money into my pension and so on.
“A lot more came with time. It was never about the money. But don’t get me wrong, you want to look after your family and your friends. And as a young boy — and yeah, I would say ‘boy’ at the time — you want cars, you want clothes and all the rest of it. Did I have anyone around to help me look with all of that? I felt at the time like I did but… probably some wrong decisions.”
We will come back to those wrong decisions — ill-advised investments and some ill-starred publicity that drew him towards a lifestyle that did him no favours once injuries and mental-health issues came to blight his later career.
But first… Marcus Bent. Did he play for your team? If you support one of those clubs who was striving to get into or stay in the Premier League between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, then there is every chance he did. He went from Brentford, to Crystal Palace, to Port Vale, to Sheffield United, to Blackburn, to Ipswich, to Leicester City, to Everton, to Charlton Athletic, to Wigan Athletic, to Birmingham City, to Middlesbrough, to Queens Park Rangers, to Wolverhampton Wanderers, and finally back to Sheffield United before one last lucrative hurrah with Mitra Kukar in the Indonesian Super League.
Bent photographed in pre-season for Palace in 1998 (Photo: Allsport UK /Allsport)
“People called me the traveller,” he says. “But I didn’t want to move from club to club. Everywhere a new club, another hotel, another new manager, another new set of team-mates to try to win over. That’s hard, you know. It’s hard when all you really want is to feel settled and appreciated.
“It might sound arrogant but I knew I would become a Premier League footballer. As a kid, up and coming, I went from Brentford to Palace, into the Premier League, and I thought, ‘Yes, I can do this’. I scored loads of goals (five in his first 16 Premier League appearances for a team doomed to relegation) and got into the England under-21 squad.
“Sheffield United; I loved it there. I’m so passionate about Sheffield United. Did well at Blackburn, got sold to Ipswich, went there and, again not being arrogant, I was killing it, won Premier League player of the month. Went to Leicester, killed it. Went to Everton; didn’t score many goals but my job was to run, work hard and create chances for others. We finished fourth in the Premier League that season (in 2004-05). I loved it at Everton. I had older players like Duncan Ferguson, Kevin Campbell, Lee Carsley, Kevin Kilbane and Alan Stubbs pushing me to do well. It was a great time in my life.”
(Photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
And then there were the times when nothing worked: struggling with homesickness and scoring just once in 24 appearances for Port Vale; falling way short of expectations at Charlton and Birmingham and various loan moves thereafter. He reels them off. “Charlton… just didn’t happen, Birmingham… just didn’t happen,” he says. “Neil Warnock, my old manager at Sheffield United, took me to QPR and I wanted to repay his faith in me. Again, it just didn’t happen. Hamstrings. Back. And most of all… my head.”
Bent didn’t enjoy the final years of his playing career. “I’m going to be honest,” he says. “I hated it.”
From what point? “It’s hard to say exactly,” he says. “But from leaving Everton (in 2006), I feel like I lost my passion for it. I felt like I wasn’t loved anymore. I don’t mean to sound like a sap but you want to feel… appreciated. That’s the word. And I went to Charlton and… like I said, it just didn’t happen. It wasn’t a good time.”
Various reports at the time suggested that Bent was having the time of his life. There were high-profile relationships with a soap actress and a former Miss Great Britain. But he looks back at that period as a time when his career and his life began to unravel.
“I think it started from me leaving Everton and also splitting up with my girlfriend at the time,” he says. “I wasn’t really focusing on anything, I was going out too much and just… rolling around like a zombie. I remember going home after training and just sleeping all afternoon and not really communicating with anyone. Life wasn’t good and I was going out and partying too much. I didn’t know what anxiety and depression were at that stage but that’s when those things kicked in.
“I think at that point I started to get portrayed as a ‘player’ — someone who goes around dating celebrities, girls who were in magazines and whatever. But… I was a young guy, a normal human being. So… would you not ?”
Bent struggled at Charlton after joining from Everton in January 2006 (Photo: Phil Cole/Getty Images)
It seemed like a glamorous existence but, beyond his daughter, from a relationship with his childhood sweetheart, his life felt increasingly devoid of substance.
“People will talk about money but — excuse my language — F the money. F the money. Yes we all want a nice house, nice car and so on, but really, truly, all we want is appreciation and love. I would finish a game and all I wanted was someone to say, ‘How was it? How are you?’ but at the time, it was, ‘Are you coming home? Where we we going? What are you buying me?’. I didn’t really have, ‘How was it? How do you feel about it?’.
“That’s the thing about football. From 18 onwards, it had just been about training, playing, getting a result. In the dressing room, on the bus, in hotels. It feels like cabin fever. If I had a bad game, who could I talk to? No-one, really. Win, lose or draw, you’d sit on the bus home afterwards and try to process it. Then it would be Sunday off, then Monday back on it and you would push those feelings aside, sweep them under the carpet. Over time, that builds up.”
The distance from his daughter, as she was growing up in London, felt greater and greater as he conducted an ever more joyless tour of northern and Midlands clubs. It made working at weekends feel like punishment, particularly when his line of work was bringing misery rather than fulfilment.
“And it’s hard to say all this because it’s the best job in the world — the best job in the world,” he says. “Fans or people reading the papers might say, ‘How could you be depressed when you’re playing football for a living and you’re getting paid so much money to do it?’ but we’re not superheroes. We’re human beings. We’ve all got our own lives and problems to deal with. Injuries, loss of confidence, relationships, being away from my daughter, feeling anxious, feeling depressed.”
Did you ever confide in a manager or team-mate? “No, that never came into it,” he says. “I would leave the ground — good game, bad game, drawn game, whatever — and I would suppress it. ‘I’m alright. I’m strong’. But it doesn’t always work that way. I wish I’d been able to go into the manager’s office and say, ‘I’m struggling. I need help’ but instead, I just suppressed it. As my career went on, it took a toll on me.”
The goals dried up completely. He had 95 to his name in all competitions when he left Everton at the age of 27. Over his final six seasons, he managed just 15. Seven of them came in a season-long loan at Wigan in the Premier League. Other than that, he says, nothing worked. “And the harder it became, the less passionate I felt about it,” he says. “Middlesbrough, QPR, Wolves; I just couldn’t get it together at all. At QPR, Neil Warnock called me in and said, ‘Come on. Last game of the season. How are you feeling? Come and sit on the bench’. I said to him, ‘Boss. I’m done. I’m sorry but I’m done.’
“And then Indonesia. Mitra Kukar. I’ll be honest, I saw it as a payday. End of my career, let’s go and see the world, see what’s going on. They gave me a huge house and a driver and they did everything to make it as nice as possible for me, and for eight months, I enjoyed the football, the lifestyle. But then, it just became a burden. I lost all passion for it and I knew it was time to call it a day.”
Flying into London from Jakarta in April 2012, Bent felt free at last from the misery the final years of his football career had brought. “I didn’t appreciate home when I was here but flying into Heathrow and seeing my country, my world, was exciting,” he says. “I was going to be free to see friends and family and spend time with my daughter. ‘Holidays, partying, family. That’s me now’ — thinking I’ve got the finances to sustain that for the rest of my life.
“It felt like a release. You think about holidays, putting your head back, your feet up. ‘This is going to be amazing’. I went to Portugal, Barbados, Mexico. I’m so grateful that my career has given me the opportunity to do that. But there’s only so many holidays you can go on. It got to the point where it was like, ‘Not another holiday’.
“And I missed football. I didn’t enjoy the final years of my career but it was still what I woke up every morning for. Going into training at ten o’clock, being with like-minded people, training. You get told what to do, you get fed. And then… I retired and I just didn’t know what to do with myself. How to do it. ‘Should I go to the gym? Nah, I’ve been training for years. I don’t need to go to the gym’. I just lost myself. And that’s when I started to self-medicate.”
And by “self-medicate”, you mean…
“Taking cocaine,” he says.
Did you ever take it when you were playing?
“Never when I was playing. It was after I’d retired.”
When was the first time?
“I can’t even remember. It wasn’t every day. It wasn’t every other day. It was more like once a week. I’m not even going to tell you the feeling. I don’t want to go into that. I just felt at the time like it took me away from my thoughts, my anxiety, the stuff I was suppressing. I wasn’t saying, ‘Let’s party’. I did it at home because I was self-conscious about anyone seeing me. And that’s how the situation happened.”
At 9.34pm on September 13, 2015, Bent called Surrey Police in a state of extreme panic from his bathroom, telling the emergency operator someone had broken into his apartment and that he feared for his life. Sixteen minutes later, three police officers arrived. There was no answer at his address but they could hear him inside shouting for help.
Three firearm officers were summoned. They were about to use a battering ram to force entry when the door flung open. There was Bent, bare-chested, wearing only a pair of tracksuit bottoms and wielding a meat cleaver and a 15-inch kitchen knife. According to the police testimony, he appeared “wild with rage” and raised a knife towards one of the officers. He was tasered and he fell to the floor, where he was restrained. Even at that point, in a state of hysteria, he kept trying to tell the police there was an intruder behind the door, behind a tree. They searched his apartment. There was nobody there. But they did discover a small quantity of cocaine.
“I was paranoid and I was hallucinating,” Bent says. “I felt there were people in my house. I remember thinking the door handle was moving. I called the police and I picked up something to defend myself. When the police came, I went to the door with these knives. If I think back, obviously I should have put the knives down but I wasn’t in a good way. So, of course, they were terrified — someone who’s on drugs, someone who’s paranoid, with two knives.
“They tasered me and I think you know the rest. But I remember going into the police station and actually feeling secure and safe. ‘I’m locked up now. No one can get me’. That’s how my mind was at that time. Then, the next morning, there was talk of me being charged with attempted murder. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. At no point was I ever going to take someone’s life. I called them because I was hallucinating, paranoid, terrified.”
Five months later, Bent admitted charges of cocaine possession and affray. He was given a suspended 12-month prison sentence, a two-month curfew and 200 hours of compulsory unpaid work. Andrew Henley, his barrister, described the incident as a “cry for help”, talking of “demons in from his past” and a “vacuum in his life” since retirement.
“That was the worst time of my life,” he says. “I was really suffering with anxiety. Waking up in sweats, going back and forth to court, walking in and being put behind a glass screen, being sentenced. It was horrible. I’d never done anything like that in my life. I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. It was hard but we got through it. My wife was amazing. So were my family and her family.
“My wife contacted the PFA and a good friend of mine, Carl Hutchings, was trying to help. But I was in denial at that point. ‘I don’t need help. I can pull through. I’m Marcus Bent’. I thought I had my shit together but I was still taking drugs.
“I didn’t want go to rehab. It was the Sporting Chance clinic, which Tony Adams helped to set up. I remember going in. I didn’t want to go. But I’d hit rock bottom and it was time to acknowledge what I was doing and what my responsibilities were.
“There were three other guys and myself. One was in for alcohol and drugs. Two were in for alcohol. Two of them were playing lower-league football. I found it so daunting. I was really scared… but putting on this facade, like I wasn’t scared. My wife left, their wives left and then the four of us were alone with the counsellors for four weeks in this small house.
“We got up every morning at seven. We’d go to the gym on the complex, have some food, come back for a counselling session and various other stuff. In the evenings, we’d go for meetings off the site with support groups. I remember saying, ‘I can’t go to one of these meetings. People might recognise me. I don’t want to be seen as someone who’s been taking drugs’. The guy said, ‘I’m sure you don’t but it’s part of the process.’
“I found it scary but all these meetings and counselling sessions; it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m not saying everyone needs to go into rehab but to get counselling like that and communicate like that, I think everyone would benefit from that. The four of us bonded and it was like a team thing again, like at Everton, and that helped to give me the tools to cope.
“The only problem is that you’re in a cocoon. You’re not in touch with the outside world. So you’re released back into the outside world and you’re like a deer in the headlights. Almost the next day, I went out to China and played in a ‘legends’ game with the likes of Emile Heskey, Steve McManaman, Michael Owen, Andy Cole. None of them knew where I’d been. I didn’t speak about it. Life was good again, I felt good, fresh. But then it was about a month or two and I relapsed.”
In June 2016, four months after the trial at Guildford Crown Court, Bent was arrested and fined £385 after being found in possession of cocaine at Chessington World of Adventures. “It wasn’t in the park itself,” he says. “I wasn’t around kids or anything like that or putting anyone in danger — other than myself. I was at the hotel, on my own in the hotel room. The hotel staff got concerned and called the police, who came and found drugs on me. This was about one o’clock in the morning.
“The police officers were quite sympathetic but the sergeant on the desk at the police station wasn’t. He was an Everton fan and he was quite hard on me. He was saying, ‘What are you doing? Get a grip’. My wife was angry with me, very frustrated, but still supportive. And then it just… I can’t even explain. It just clicked. I thought, ‘I’ve got responsibilities. I’ve got a young daughter. I can’t keep doing this.’”
In May 2013, Bent went on Instagram and posted a quote: “The truth is, it doesn’t really matter who I used to be. It’s about who I’ve become.”
He wasn’t confronting his issues when he said that. He was in denial, a year into retirement and falling headlong towards the place he would ultimately recognise as rock bottom. Looking back, it makes no sense, but the quote rings true now.
For all the glitz and the adulation, professional football can be a dark, lonely place. When the floodlights fade, the darkness can take hold. It took a long time for Bent to get his bearings and to start trying to put his life back together.
It has been proved easier said than done. In January last year, he was declared bankrupt, unable to pay a seven-figure tax bill, the legacy of an extravagant lifestyle and some ill-advised investments in film-based tax-avoidance schemes. “Some bad investments,” he says. “Some good investments but some bad investments. And, to be honest, a lot of cards. A lot of clothes. A lot of partying. A lot of spending too much money that I shouldn’t have spent.
“Am I proud of that? No. But being a young boy at the time, a young guy, it felt like money on a tap. Put the card in and get out what you want. It wasn’t. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way and I’m now on the right track.”
Bent has been drug-free for nearly four years. He recently dabbled with the idea of a comeback at Cornard United, in the Thurlow Nunn League Division One North, but, at 41, he soon knocked it on the head. “But I still play locally and I’ll have a bit of a run-out,” he says. “I lost that passion for a long time, so it’s nice to get out, have a run about. But don’t get me wrong, my body is still in bits a week later. Seriously, in bits .”
He hopes to break into media work. Some of the offers he has had were not exactly what he was looking for. “I’ve had offers from Dancing on Ice , the one with the house (Big Brother), the jungle one (I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!). People say to me, ‘Just do it. Make some money’. But that’s not me. It’s not real. I couldn’t be passionate about that. The only thing like that I would do is one of those Survivor shows with Bear Grylls, being out in the world, trying to find food. That’s real.”
One welcome dose of reality came with the unpaid community work he did as part of his sentence. He worked in a charity shop. At first he was embarrassed by the idea of such work, fearing people would recognise him. As time went on, helping out gave him a sense of fulfilment. Once his 200 hours were up, he went back for more.
In January, he became a father for the second time when his wife Katie gave birth to a daughter. “My oldest girl has just turned 16 and when she was growing up, I was travelling back and forth, all over the country and I wasn’t around as much as I wish I had been,” he says. “This time, having stopped playing, it’s different. We were up and down six times in the night last night, changing nappies, getting bottles. I’m 41, coming up to 42. I did ask myself beforehand, ‘Am I too old to do that?’ but it’s great. Tiring but great.”
His rehabilitation continued recently when he was contacted by Everton to ask whether, in light of his previous issues, he might be willing to join the club’s mental health campaign. He jumped at the opportunity. “Everton In The Community are doing some absolutely amazing work for mental health and helping people who have depression,” he says. “It’s great to be able to give something back, particularly through Everton. But again, heading up there, for the first time in years, I was anxious. Proper anxiety. I couldn’t just turn up and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Marcus. I played for Everton. How are you?’.
“Even now, mental health doesn’t get the attention it should. There’s a Mental Health Day. Great — but we should think about mental health every day. That’s what Everton are trying to do. Communicating helps. Venting helps. It helped me and I hope it helped the people I spoke to. That’s why we were there, so we could be open and talk about what we’ve been through, what we’re going through. I had multiple messages on the back of that from teenagers and adults going through the same thing, people asking me for advice. I don’t have a key. I don’t know what to say at all times but if my story and my experiences helps even one person, I’m good with that.
“Life isn’t perfect. It never is. Like I said, I wake up with anxiety every day. But I’m good now. I’ll get up, go to the gym, look after my wife, look after our baby, look after myself and keep my mind active rather than just sitting there and looking out of the window at the rain. It’s great to get out and walk the dogs. I’ve got two French bulldogs. One of them is from Liverpool and I swear he barks with a Scouse accent. He’s got the Scouse personality too. He’s great.
“I’ll go to the gym and I’ll talk to people. People ask how I am. It’s nice to be able to reply. I felt like I didn’t have that for years, when I was suppressing everything, letting it build up. I was worried about this interview but it’s good. I’m venting. I’ve let a lot of things out. I’ll walk away from here with a lighter chest.”
Do you consider the environmental impact before taking drugs mate?
Is this guy a soccer player? Nobody cares.
Only total dickheads do cocaine