Dr. Drew Is Wrong

Dr. Drew Pinsky is a celebrity doctor who has doled out medical advice on the radio for over 25 years. He is now a media franchise and has become the nation’s popular expert on addiction with his television shows Celebrity Rehab and Sober House. Unfortunately, several of his proclamations are wrong.

Willpower Does Work

Pinsky is a champion of the disease theory of addiction. In his words, “Addicts have intense neurobiological patterns in the brain that have a grip on them, and willpower doesn’t work.” (Hochman)

Studies have found the legal drug nicotine to be the most addictive substance. Yet roughly half of those who have ever smoked have quit without treatment. The percentage of former heroin, cocaine, and alcohol addicts who have quit without professional assistance is even higher. (Peele, p. 1)

As Dr. Stanton Peele, an addiction expert, explains, “an enormous treatment/recovery industry, backed by a large government bureaucracy” insists on perpetuating the myth that curing addiction cannot possibly take any route but their own. (Peele, p. 2)

The Damage Dr. Drew Causes

“Disease” centered treatment helps many people, however, by damning any other route to stability Dr. Drew does a great disservice. A 1996 study that tracked subjects in outpatient alcohol treatment found that “belief in the disease model of alcoholism” was one of two primary factors in predicting relapse. (Peele, p. 38)

This is common sense. If you brow beat someone into thinking they are a life-long addict with no will power is it surprising that they are more likely to behave like someone with no willpower?

Dr. Drew and Artie Lange

The addiction theory is an attractive concept to addicts as it excuses their actions and frees them from responsibility. But one addict who is not buying it is Artie Lange of The Howard Stern Show. (Read post about Lange’s addiction here.) On a Pinsky appearance on The Howard Stern Show (1/12/09) Pinsky said of Lange, “You have to see Artie as a heroin addict. Everything’s bullshit.” Lange responded re Pinsky’s rehab shows, “You wanna be famous and you’re exploiting people to get there.” Later adding, “[Pinsky’s] taking advantage of the biggest fuck ups in LA right now …. They’re not getting proper treatment.”

Lange has recently devised a new program for himself to stay off heroin which involves exercise and keeping two ex-cops by his side. Dr. Drew called Lange’s plans “self-will run riot” and said that as long as Lange is calling the shots for himself he will fail. Dr. Drew said Lange needs a six-month spiritual program of recovery and that his life depends on it. (Dell’Abate, 5/7/09) Lange was infuriated about this damnation and questioned Pinsky’s motives revealing that Lange had been offered $250,000 to do three weeks on Pinsky’s show, Celebrity Rehab.

Other Dr. Drew Myths

“Heroin addiction has a worse prognosis than cancer.” (Dell’Abate, 1/12/09) – A study of heroin users found the annual death rate to be 1%. Taken out of the criminalized context, in a three year heroin maintenance program with over 1,000 patients no one died.

“One out of ten heroin addicts beat it.” (Dell’Abate, 1/12/09) – I do not know Pinsky’s source but drug abuse studies are almost always skewed in that they focus on people in treatment. (Imagine how alcohol would be portrayed if all media and research coverage was of those in rehab.) One study that was drawn from a more general population of users was that of heroin addicts returning from Vietnam. Very few received treatment, and yet after leaving Vietnam only 12% continued to be addicted. (This cannot be attributed to availability as six in ten of those addicted in Vietnam used a narcotic after returning.) The relapse rate was actually higher for veterans who were treated for their addiction than those who were not.

If my kids ever did heroin I would load up their car with heroin and call the cops. (Dell’Abate, 1/12/09) – This claim led Lange to call Pinsky a “bullshitter.” I too question whether Pinsky would want his son to be imprisoned for years as a dealer and burdened with a criminal record so that every future employer would know about it. (How would George W. Bush and Barack Obama turned out if their relatives took the same tact with their cocaine use? LINK) As a public defender I saw many people who viewed drug use as a criminal matter quickly change their minds when their loved one was the one facing prison time.

“That part of the body wasn’t made for doing [anal sex], and I dread to see what will happen to these women down the line …. it won’t be pretty.” (Hochman) – According to Dr. Jack Morin, an expert in anal health, there is “no convincing evidence” that safe and responsible anal sex causes disease. (Morin, p. 223) In addition, the sphincter is a muscle and stretching it is no more damaging than stretching exercises are to any other muscles in the body.

More recent post on Dr. Drew Pinsky: Did Dr. Drew Lie About His Drug Use?

Sources:

1. Robert Arthur, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (2008).
2. Gary Dell’Abate, The Howard Stern Show, Sirius XM Radio.
3. David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Dr. Drew Pinsky,” Playboy, 1 July 2008.
4. Jack Morin, Anal Pleasure and Health (1998).
5. Stanton Peele, Seven Tools to Beat Addiction (2004).

Leave Your Cocaine Outside the White House

Drugs Equal Death?

This cartoon uses the same rationale that the Office of National Drug Control Policy used in the following asinine marijuana ad, LINK.

Barack Obama is open about his past cocaine use. (Although it would be interesting to know how candid Obama would be if his admission had not been published in 1995.) Despite the fact that most cocaine users never become dependent, the mainstream media finds it noteworthy that Obama could have used cocaine without having drug problems as this New York Times snippet shows:

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

Bush on the other hand is not open about his raucous past. Multiple people allege that he used to use cocaine like fellow staffers from a 1972 Republican senatorial campaign who have claimed he, “liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the bathroom for a line of cocaine.”

Bush himself has never denied using cocaine, instead choosing to be coy. Republican hacks like to seize on the fact he once denied using “hard drugs,” however, put in context this appears to have meant heroin. Of course, at Fox any notion of Bush using cocaine is blasphemy. LINK

Sources

1. Robert Arthur, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (2007). LINK
2. Kitty Kelley, The Family (2004).
3. Serge Kovaleski, “Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life,” New York Times, 9 Feb. 2008, ret. NYTimes.com, 28 Feb. 2008. LINK

Why They Hate Us

Would We Stand For It?

1. In 1982 Ronald Reagan launched his disastrous war on drugs with the words, “We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We’re running up a battle flag.”

2. In 2000 there were an estimated 85,000 alcohol related deaths in the United States alone. In 2005 there were 40,000 deaths from alcohol poisoning (alcohol overdose) in Russia alone.

3. Destroying drug crops in foreign lands was an idea conceived by the Reagan administration. Reagan hired mercenaries to clear the coca fields of poor Peruvian farmers with weed whackers. This was a farce considering coca grows naturally in Peru in valleys the size of Massachusetts. America is now waging this vegetative vendetta against poppies in Afghanistan.

4. America’s next plan was to aerially dump herbicides over the South American countryside. While officially targeting coca these toxins kill all plant life – including subsistance crops – while poisoning the environment and the local residents. This technique is still used in South America as a part of Plan Colombia. Afghanistan has understandably refused to allow the United States to dump herbicides on its countryside.

5. Another part of Plan Colombia is to pay farmers to plant crops other than coca. Like the previous two tactics, this has been comically ineffective as Bolivian farmers who switched to ginger learned when they found themselves, “up to their asses in ginger,” and nobody willing to buy it.

6. America uses its full diplomatic weight and financial power to bully other countries against liberalizing their drug laws. In 2006 America stopped Mexico’s legislation to legalize small amounts of drugs with a closed door meeting. The American position was that drug liberalization by Mexico would lead to narco-tourism for Americans. (America has an officer in most major foreign embassies charged with keeping Washington informed of any liberalization of drug policies.) How much America spends to coerce other countries to keep prosecuting their citizens is rarely revealed to the American public.

7. For thousands of years opium had been smoked as medicine in South Asia and coca has been chewed for sustenance in South America with miniscule deleterious effects. However, the American media portrays Afghanistan as a cesspool of addiction due to its easy access to opium. In articles such as Newsweek’s “Flowers of Destruction” and “Harvest of Treachery” moderate use of the drug is ignored and dysfunctional addicts who constitute a microscopic percentage of the population are highlighted. (The fact that the drug war drives people to use harder versions of the drug is always ignored. This recently occurred in rural Laos where an opium crackdown precipitated by immense Western pressure drove many tribespeople to heroin.)

More on Plan Colombia can be found in a Nation article, LINK, and at Wikipedia, LINK. The ongoing billion dollar program has killed a lot of flora, provoked massive amounts of bloodshed with American provided weaponry, and caused deep American resentment. It has not affected cocaine prices in the United States.

Sources:

1. “Alcohol Deaths Falling as Quality of Booze Climbs,” Moscow Times, 29 Jan. 2008. LINK courtesy of ViceSquad.
2. Robert Arthur, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (2007). LINK
3. Mike Gray, Drug Crazy (1998). LINK
4. Phillip Knightley, “What Went Wrong? The Drugs World War: Part Two,” Independent (London), 1 Feb. 1998.
5. “Laos’s Opium Ban,” Economist, 13 Aug. 2005.