'My brother died of an overdose like The Vivienne – I understand the gnawing guilt'

I understand the gnawing guilt of not being able to save your addict brother from dying of an overdose. The sister of James Lee Williams, otherwise known as The Vivienne, has revealed that the first time the family knew about her brother's ketamine addiction was when the contestant from Liverpool spoke about it on The Drag Race UK in 2019.

I happened to be watching the show at the time, and I was willing The Vivienne to win from the start – brutally honest, funny and smart as a whip, the drag star was the show’s fallen angel.

I admire The Vivienne’s family for now being so open about James’s death – their decision to speak about the entertainer’s addiction will save lives. Sister Chanel admits, “A big thing for me now is, had I asked the questions or looked for the signs, would the outcome be different?”

I have often asked myself that same question, but I believe the stigma of addiction means many people don’t come forward and ask for help. My late brother James McNally was a talented jazz musician who played the London clubs. We used to see each other regularly until I moved out of London, got married to my late husband David and had a baby daughter, Jesse, in 2009.

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These major life changes meant sometimes months would go by without me seeing my brother. By the time I got a phone from Jackson, his old best mate from school, to warn me that James was using hard drugs, it was already too late.

Looking back now, it’s very likely that my brother had undiagnosed autism. It wasn’t just his obsession with playing the guitar to the detriment of all else – including school – that makes me think that, but also his crippling anxiety and insomnia.

James didn’t drink alcohol or smoke ciggies – unlike me who lived off Chardonnay and Marlborough Lights in those years – but I do recall him saying he started smoking cannabis as a teenager to help get him off to sleep at night., and later he said the same about smoking heroin.

James always struggled at bedtime as a child, and I used to listen to him “rocking” himself to sleep in his cot. Like he was on a little imaginary rocking horse.

It’s memories like that make me worry that my own daughter, who was diagnosed with autism five years ago aged 11, may also start to self-medicate when she's older without treatment for her anxiety and sleep problems.

Thankfully now Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) have finally stepped in, but it has taken five years of tearful begging phone calls to finally get some professional help – and during this turbulent time, my daughter Jesse has already missed a great deal of school.

James Lee Williams' sister Chanel says her brother kept addiction a secret to protect the family.

The problems for James started when rave culture came along in the ’90s, and my brother threw himself into the party scene with gusto. Friends remember how he loved dance drugs like ecstasy and even ketamine, but nobody considered him a problem user.

It wasn’t until James moved in with a new girlfriend around 2003 that he began smoking heroin – it was rife in the jazz scene at the time – and being a poor musician, he couldn’t sustain the habit, nor was he a good enough thief to turn to crime.

Instead James was put on methadone for the rest of his life and had to queue up at the chemist hatch every day to collect his prescription along with all the other addicts and homeless people, who were treated like second class citizens.

I recall James would especially worry about bank holidays when he struggled to get enough methadone for the long weekend as he wasn’t allowed to collect more than a day’s worth at a time. It meant he couldn’t have a normal life and hold down a job, or go on holiday. He was kept trapped in a cycle of addiction.

Methadone may stop the physical cravings of heroin, but it doesn’t give users a high. And because they’re addicted to getting that buzz, many methadone go on to have dual addictions.

My teetotal brother started drinking bottles of cheap, strong cider, and taking… well, anything he could get his hands on. After all, they didn’t treat the addiction or the source of his mental health problems, they just stuck him on methadone until it destroyed his body.

At some point James was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression, which is hardly surprising considering how he was living. He didn’t commit any crimes, so he didn’t come to attention of social services or end up in prison where at least he might have had some chance of professional help.

Instead, he just lived in squalor in a bedsit in East London, and all Mum and I could do was make sure he had enough food to live on, and would send shopping deliveries to his home because we couldn’t trust him with cash.

I lost count of the number of times Mum or I would get calls from Homerton Hospital in Hackney, East London – where James ended up on life support machines several times after overdosing. The money it cost to keep him alive and barely existing on methadone was staggering. If only drug addiction services has spent that discovering the causes of his addiction, rather than mopping up the mess, it would have been a different story for him.

We couldn’t advocate for James because he was an adult, which made us feel helpless. To get clean and sober, he needed his family’s love and support, but if we ever tried to speak to a professional about him, we were shut out of all conversations because of patient privacy.

It was only a matter of time before we got phone call that we had been dreading. On Monday November 7, 2016, James died in his sleep from a list of substances in his system as long as your arm, but it was the high levels diazepam which slowed his heart down until it had stopped.

When they found him, James had been reading one of his favourite acerbic Will Self novels before he fell asleep. It was a mercifully quiet and painless death for someone who had lived with so much agony.

At the inquest, I also discovered from the autopsy notes that James also had the beginnings of emphysema which more than likely had been caused by smoking crack.

I believe my brother would still be alive today if he had been given heroin assisted treatment like they do in more enlightened countries like Germany and Switzerland.

I’ve seen first hand how this country’s Drug and Alcohol Support Services are stuck in the dark ages, with staff treating addicts with disdain, and how they set the bar too high too high to access rehabilitation services. You almost need rehab just to start rehab!

We need to have a discussion about how we treat our citizens with substance abuse issues in this country – we need to help people, not criminalise them.

There are no videos of my virtuoso brother playing guitar – all I have is his old beaten-up acoustic guitar which I rescued when they cleared out his squat. It was too worthless to sell for drugs, and that’s all he owned along with piles of paperback novels.

I had it cleaned and restrung and gave it to Jesse. She doesn’t remember her uncle, but then one day a few years ago she picked it up and taught herself to play – she has James’s long, slender fingers and beautiful singing voice, but also his autistic anxiety and insomnia.

I couldn’t help James, but I can save my daughter.