Dr. Drew Pinsky (known familiarly as Dr. Drew) is the pre-eminent expert on drug addiction and alcoholism in this country. He is most famous for his TV show Celebrity Rehab, whose patients boast a relapse rate below 80%, and a death rate below 15%.
AddictionMyth sat down recently with Dr. Drew for an intimate conversation conducted entirely by mental telepathy. Continue reading A conversation with addictions expert/rehab entrepreneur Dr. Drew Pinsky
Every addict knows that while it’s hard to overdose on heroin alone, it’s pretty easy to kill yourself by mixing with alcohol. You have to be careful about that. Benzos and alcohol are also a deadly mix. Surely Cory Monteith, the beautiful young star of the hit TV show Glee, was aware of this. And yet, he died from exactly this cocktail, like so many other drug addicts. By all accounts, he didn’t intend to kill himself. The power of addiction was just too strong. He couldn’t resist the urge.
Continue reading Cory Monteith: The Cult of Powerlessness Claims Another Victim
Dr. Hart is a tenured professor at Columbia and expert on the science and pharmacology of illicit drugs. He grew up in the Miami ghetto where he experienced first hand the scourge of drug addiction and the impact on his community. He entered neuroscience with the goal of curing addiction, but he discovered during the course of his career, much to his surprise, that in fact drugs had little to do with the problems that he saw. In fact, it was the draconian drug laws and heavy handed enforcement that created misery and injustice for members of his family and community, much moreso than the drugs themselves — which he now claims, based on his years of research, are not really so dangerous after all. Continue reading A conversation with Columbia neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart
Prominent Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart busts many commonly accepted myths about drugs, including the Addiction Myth, in his new book High Times: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society.
Continue reading The Man Who Almost Cured Addiction
Clancy Martin is the Chair of the Philosophy Department at University of Missouri. He is an expert in Nietzsche. His PhD dissertation was on the philosophy of lying. He is also a best selling author of How to Sell (2009), a semi-autobiographical account of a young man in the jewelry business who engages in various unethical methods to make money. “First lie to yourself about what grade the diamond is; then you can sincerely tell your customer ‘the truth’ about what it’s worth.” He drinks to quash the feelings of guilt caused by his peccadilloes. And he (the author) is also an alcoholic. Continue reading An Interview with Philosopher/Author/Alcoholic Clancy Martin
Paul Carr is a young writer and adventurer. He is also an alcoholic. He decided to get sober a few years ago. However, he didn’t exactly like what AA had to offer, so he wrote his own 12 steps. They are outlined in this Wall Street Journal article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281413725296538.html
AddictionMyth sat down with Mr. Carr for this intimate interview conducted by email. Continue reading A conversation with author/alcoholic Paul Carr
David Sheff is the best selling author of Beautiful Boy, the account of his son’s struggle with drug addiction. Recently, he came out with a new book, Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy, which describes the state of the treatment industry, and what a person has to do to get clean from drugs.
AddictionMyth recently sat down with Mr. Sheff for an intimate interview via email. Continue reading A conversation with David Sheff, author of “Clean”
So what if AA is a Pagan cult? Whether or not you think alcoholism is a disease, AA helps people who are in a really bad spot and keeps them out of trouble. They are less likely to drink or do drugs while attending meetings and performing the 12 Steps. Why so stuck up on Christianity? What’s the problem here?
Continue reading AA is a Pagan Cult
I feel like AA has been getting really boring lately. The speaker’s stories are not as salacious as they used to be. I think it’s because they are leaving out juicy details to avoid glamorizing their hedonistic lifestyle, or to avoid mention of criminality. Certainly, it protects AA’s reputation as a do-gooders society (if they mentioned these things they would easily be identified as the scoundrels that they are). But it makes the meetings boring. The whole point of AA is to drink as cover for mischief. So what’s the point without the mischief? Continue reading AA is getting really boring
Several people at tonight’s meeting in West Hollywood expressed their secret desire to be locked up, either in jail or in a padded room in a mental hospital. Our speaker tonight was a very handsome young man (late 30’s but looked much younger, and very LA style) who spoke of his drug and alcohol career in the mid-west before moving here. He mentioned a desire, during the depths of his drug use, to be sent to jail where all his needs would be taken care of. During the shares, several people commented on that, and described their own desire to be put away. One young man was despondent about his life, and his job as a telemarketer, and expressed his fantasy to commit a crime just so that he’d be locked up. Two of the young women expressed a desire to be put in a padded cell, where they wouldn’t have to worry about anything. Continue reading Lock me up, please!
“I drank so much that I couldn’t remember what happened afterwards, except I woke up in a stranger’s bedroom surrounded by empty condom wrappers and a guy snoring loudly next to me.”
The alcoholic will often claim “blackout”. We are supposed to take this as evidence that the drinker is compulsive and unable to control their intake. Excessive drinking to the point of memory loss is a symptom of the disease. After all, why would someone put themselves in that kind of situation intentionally?
Continue reading I call “Blackout”
The speaker at today’s Old Timer’s meeting was a trollish man with a powerful stage presence who recounted the story of his addiction to alcohol and every other drug he could get pudgy hands on. He currently has 35 years sobriety.
His father was an alcoholic – an ‘animal’ who abused his wife and their 9 children. The family had a reputation in the small New England neighborhood for being ‘bad people’, and our venerable speaker was one of the baddest in the bunch. “All I ever been was a punk.” Continue reading Some people will never understand