Doctor’s orders

A year ago, Drew Pinsky, host of the 25-year-old call-in advice show Loveline (airing on Q101.1), launched his latest media venture: VH1’s Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, which follows celebs in the addiction-treatment program at the Pasadena Recovery Center. On January 15 at 9pm, VH1 premieres yet another Dr. Drew program: the Rehab spin-off, Sober House. For our detox issue, the doctor called via cell.

Time Out Chicago: What do you attribute your interest in addiction to?
Dr. Drew: It’s such an interesting window into the human being: How do humans function when their primary motivational system, which is survival, is broken? And it was interesting to learn to deal with patients without listening to what they were saying to me. Everything they say is B.S., so I have to intuit what’s going on 100 percent of the time.

TOC: I thought doctors were supposed to listen to their patients.
Dr. Drew: Unless you’re dealing with drug addicts all the time, and then you listen to how they make you feel, and you trust whatever comes out of your mouth.

TOC: Have drugs, alcohol or sex ever been a problem for you?
Dr. Drew: Not that I’m aware of—knock wood. I don’t seem to have the genetic potential for it. These things don’t do much for me; they just don’t.

TOC: You ever been wildly drunk or high?
Dr. Drew: Not wildly high. I have been drunk in my life, and I end up vomiting. I just don’t tolerate it.

TOC: Now that your triplets are 16, how do you counsel them about this stuff?
Dr. Drew: Drugs and alcohol, where I really know my shit, I’m super-duper hardcore. I told my kids, “Look. I don’t allow illegal activity. Period. And if people haul your ass off ’cause you break the law, I ain’t gonna bail you out. I could be the one to call the law enforcement, too, if I see you breaking the law.”

TOC: You’d call the cops on your own kids?
Dr. Drew: Hell, yes! If I had a heroin-addicted kid, I would pack his car with heroin, send him off and call the cops immediately—’cause that is the only way to save a kid’s life if they’re going down that path.

TOC: Do you think Celebrity Rehab exploits people’s misfortunes for viewers’ prurient interests?
Dr. Drew: That’s what potentially motivates people to turn on the channel. The patients get good treatment, the patients don’t feel exploited; they feel grateful and want to be an inspiration. The viewer is not sitting in judgment; they’re connecting in an impassioned, empathic way. How could that be exploitative? Believe me, I worried like crazy; I was constantly at first asking them, “Are you okay? Are you able to do this with the cameras around?” Finally [former porn star] Mary Carey goes, “Hey, Drew, I’ve done everything on camera. Cameras don’t bother me.”

TOC: So the fact that it’s celebrity rehab makes it not exploitative, as opposed to everyday-person rehab?
Dr. Drew: I originally wanted to make the point that celebrities and real people are treated the same in treatment. So my original recommendation was that we put regular people in with the celebrities. What I found was the regular person couldn’t understand when I would say, “When this airs, what if you’ve divulged delicate material? Are you going to be ashamed?” I canceled it because not only did I feel it could be harmful to them, I didn’t feel they could render informed consent. Celebrities understood exactly what we were talking about.

TOC: What about the flip side of the exploitation question? Do some celebs use the show as publicity?
Dr. Drew: Some people enter it with that motivation. We don’t care what motivates them into treatment. Once we get them in, we can get something done.

TOC: Jeff Conaway, for instance, seems like he hams it up for the camera.
Dr. Drew: Yep, absolutely. And I had to figure out: Are they doing this for the camera? Or is this your usual-ass bullshit? [Laughs]

TOC: Besides Celebrity Rehab and Sober House, you’ve done Loveline, Strictly Sex, Sex with Mom and Dad. Are you addicted to others’ addictions?
Dr. Drew: [Laughs] You mean, am I addicted to media?

TOC: That, too.
Dr. Drew: I’m definitely not addicted to people’s addictions. I’m addicted to the human experience, and addiction is a wonderful way to look at the human experience. As far as the media, I wouldn’t call it an addiction, but I gravitate toward the things that are most pertinent to the period of history I’m living in, and media is this incredible force that my profession hasn’t figured out how to use.

TOC: Why the no-sex rule on Celebrity Rehab and Sober House?
Dr. Drew: When somebody’s in a medical-care facility, I can’t share the medical condition of any patient with any other patient, so I can’t tell them if they have herpes, AIDS, hepatitis. And I’m responsible for their safety while they’re in our facility. Number two: Most of these people are trauma survivors, and trauma survivors reenact traumas of their past. We want to frustrate that behavior, make them look at what’s motivating it. And should they consummate that behavior, they feel retraumatized and blame us and have a good reason to sabotage their treatment.

TOC: But they even took away Mary Carey’s porn and dildo. Why’s it a problem if she watches porn?
Dr. Drew: Because it’s just another drug for her, and she uses it as a drug. For an addict, sex and drugs go into the same category.

TOC: Speaking of that: Do you think sexual addiction is a true diagnosis or just a trendy pop diagnosis?
Dr. Drew: It’s both. When you see a real sex addict, there is no doubt about it. They are one of the most miserable populations and dangerous people you could ever meet. They have profound shame and guilt about what they’re doing—profound—and they usually hurt other people in terms of exploiting them and destroying relationships. They’re really—oh, they’re miserable.

TOC: In O magazine last year, you said, “Addiction is the problem of our time.” What’s so distinctive about our time?
Dr. Drew: The chemicals being distributed have never been more rapidly addictive, and the distribution of both pharmaceuticals and street drugs has never been more powerful. And if you’re sick enough to need addiction treatment, there’s a 100-percent probability you had childhood trauma.

TOC: How do we know that’s any worse now than it used to be?
Dr. Drew: I’ve suffered through 15 years of people going, “Oh, we’re just talking about it more. We’re just more aware of it now.” Oh no, oh no no no. We live in a time where we’ve been unhinged from our moral and religious compass, which you can argue is a good or bad thing. And more importantly from my perspective, our biological mooring has been cut. Infectious diseases used to kill people; now we’re treated with a single dose of antibiotic. So there isn’t the risk of acting out this way to the individual. They’re used to be profound risk. It ain’t there.

TOC: You’ve said addiction-treatment programs like the one on the show work but may take many treatments. Given that high recidivism rate, what then counts as working?
Dr. Drew: Look, what do you call treatment? Let’s take insulin. You take insulin, your blood sugar stays under control, but every once in a while it goes out of control, you need to be hospitalized. You say insulin is a failure as a treatment of diabetes, is that what you say? Or do you say insulin is an excellent treatment that we gotta keep applying till we get this thing under control? It’s so retarded that we look at addiction through a totally different prism than we do all the other medical conditions.

TOC: What’s your biggest vice?
Dr. Drew: Exercise. I’m trying to actually run while we’re talking right now.

TOC: You’ve been jogging all this time?
Dr. Drew: Most of it. Otherwise I would not have time to do it, so I gotta multitask, and it is something I need desperately.

TOC: You’re an exercise addict.
Dr. Drew: I’m closer to, like, an exercise bulimic than an exercise addict—yeah, I am an exercise addict. I’ll give you that.