We’ve been looking at addiction all wrong.
There was nothing glamorous about the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who left this life lying on a bathroom floor of his Greenwich Village apartment, clad in boxer shorts and a T-shirt with a hypodermic syringe stuck in his left forearm. He was 46.
Yet glorifying and enabling drug abusers is what those in the multibillion-dollar addiction industry do best. Since he succumbed to an apparent heroin overdose Feb. 2, Hoffman, the brilliant performer who won a Best Actor Oscar for 2005’s “Capote,” is painted by leaders in the drug trade not as an adult who made the fatal decision to get high. Hoffman is routinely infantilized as the victim of a “disease” — a word I reject like Ebola.
The recovery vultures are circling. Profiteers who make their livings from human misery have been jumping in front of TV cameras and keyboards — shrinks, rehab providers, celebrities and advocates of the ubiquitous, and usually useless, 12-step recovery programs, popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. (Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over our addiction — that our lives had become unmanageable.)
“There is no cure for addiction, which is a chronic disease, the same as diabetes, asthma and heart disease,” Janina Kean, president and CEO of High Watch Recovery Center in Connecticut, told CBS News, equating Hoffman’s decision to use drugs with an incurable illness.
Addiction “is a medical disease, not a choice,” Dr. Kim Dennis, CEO of Timberline Knolls, a Florida center that treats problems from eating disorders to drug abuse, wrote on her blog. It was quoted in The Washington Post.
“Saying that a person addicted to drugs can ‘just stop’ is like telling a diabetic they can simply toss out that insulin and be fine,” Dennis wrote.
“Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws” was the title of a loopy column written by British comedian/actor Russell Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, in The Guardian newspaper. He argued for drug legalization and blamed the actor’s death on everything from society’s fascination with celebrity culture to our supposed contempt for addicts — but he fails to wag his finger at Hoffman himself.
“Would Hoffman have died if this disease were not so enmeshed in stigma? If we weren’t invited to believe that people who suffer from addiction deserve to suffer?” wrote Brand. “Would he have OD’d if drugs were regulated, controlled and professionally administered?”
Steven Slate has another take.
“I was snorting heroin for a few years before I went to my first rehab,” he told me. “It was repeated to me, over and over, that everyone who uses heroin will shoot up.
“Within a week after leaving rehab, I started shooting up,” said Slate, 37. “It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Slate cleaned up his act at St. Jude Retreats, which bills itself as an alternative to standard drug-treatment centers. Now he runs the company’s New York City office. At the three St. Jude facilities in upstate New York, about 45 guests — they’re not called patients — are never told they’re sick.
“They do drugs because it makes them happy,” said Slate. During a six-week residential program, the goal is for guests to find new hobbies.
News of Hoffman’s final self-destructive excesses, a twisted menu of drugs and overspending, have absorbed every human with a working Internet connection.
Hoffman paid $9,800 a month in rent, or nearly 5¹/₂ times my monthly mortgage payment. He lived alone for about three months after his costume-designer girlfriend, Mimi O’Donnell, alarmed at his use, kicked him out of the flat he shared with her and their three kids.
He spent the last night of his life in the company of two alleged drug dealers, withdrawing $1,200 in six transactions from an ATM in a Village D’Agostino market, the money likely dispensed in a wad of 60 $20 bills. Cops say he paid the dealers $1,000 to score heroin and cocaine.
For stars with unlimited means and toadies at their disposal, traditional treatment programs clearly don’t work. It’s doubtful they work for anyone.
Slate said 38 percent of St. Jude guests suffer relapses over time and go back to drinking alcohol or using drugs. But some of those people are merely drinking socially, which St. Jude allows — and traditional drug-abuse programs forbid. That compares with the 40-60 percent drug-relapse rate estimated by the National Institute of on Drug Abuse. Those numbers may be low.
A 2005 study by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Center in Australia found that a frightening 79 to 100 percent of those who used drugs such as heroin will relapse within the first three months after they sober up.
In the end, heroin was Hoffman’s companion. The sad inventory of items police found in his apartment included 50 plastic bags of heroin bearing the words “Ace of Spades’’ and “Ace of Hearts,” plus 20 empty bags. There were 20 used syringes and a batch of fresh ones, five vials containing various prescription pills, and a charred spoon Hoffman likely used to cook up his final fix.
Hoffman had been sober for 23 years before diving off the wagon.
He made his choice.
Jay Leno leaves a winner
I miss him already. In his final broadcast as host of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” Jay came off as the conservative darling that Americans adore and the suits running the NBC network despise.
“The worst thing about losing this job: I’m no longer covered by NBC — I have to sign up for ObamaCare,” Jay, 63, quipped before he was booted out the door.
For 22 years, minus the bleak months that Conan O’Brien took over “Tonight,” Jay has almost always led late-night TV ratings. Will Jay’s replacement, Jimmy Fallon, 39, come close? I won’t know.
I’m going to bed early from now on.
Sealed with a kiss (& pinch)
Mayor de Blasio bestowed two kisses on his wife, Chirlane McCray, plus a high-five and a pinch — on her arm. The public displays of affection came last week as Hizzoner announced that he was appointing the city’s first lady as the new chairwoman of the nonprofit Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, which raises private money for city projects like health care and the environment. McCray won’t get paid.
She will, however, become boss of an eight-person staff, and oversee a budget that reached $37 million in 2012, most of it donated. I’d ask my husband pinch me, too.
It’s a serious beef
Yuck! A Manhattan hot-dog vendor was hit with $330,000 in fines and more than 400 summonses for, among other urban outrages, failing to protect his street meat from contamination, The Post reported.
Ehab Elsayed — if that’s really his name — kept changing his identity after he had four licenses yanked by the city Health Department between 2005 and 2012.
Each time, he got new ones. Now, he’s running from the law.
Think about him the next time you slam down two bucks for lunch.
Silda gets shot at ad do-over
Silda is free! After 26 years, the marriage of Silda Wall Spitzer, 56, and Eliot Spitzer, 54, is officially kaput. A Manhattan matrimonial judge last week ended Silda’s suffering, signing off on a divorce settlement with Eliot, who bedded hookers while serving as New York’s governor. Last month, he was seen cavorting with his mistress, Lis Smith, in a hot tub on the island of Jamaica.
Silda can do better.