Dr. Drew Talks About Addiction and Recovery
Dr. Drew Pinsky is a media personality and addiction specialist. He’s best known as the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, Loveline since 1984, and as the host of several tv shows– including Celebrity Rehab, and Dr. Drew on HLN. Dr. Drew stopped by the SiriusXM studios this week and talked with Ron Bennington about his newest series, Life Changers.
Ron Bennington: I know you’ve got the Life Changers show out but how many other shows are you doing right now?
Dr. Drew Pinksy: A couple. I’ve got the HLN show that we do 9:00 every night, and then Lovelines still on radio, and then I do Sixteen and Pregnant, and Teen Mom Reunions, and then we’re going to do another Celebrity Rehab season, except we’re going to do it with regular folks only, no celebrites.
Ron Bennington: If someone came to you and said, this is my work schedule, would you say to them you need a little more balance?
Dr. Drew Pinksy: Not right now, no. But when I was really a workaholic, I packed like three careers in medicine into twenty years. I was director of medicine in a psychiatric hospital, I was chief of their addiction services, I had a big private practice, and I was very hospital in acute medical hospital. that was ridiculous. Where I would get up at 5:30 in the morning and struggle to get home by ten o’clock at night. I did that for like a decade. That was sick. This feels easy compared to that.
Ron Bennington: Do you think that you’ve been good to your family over the years? Do you feel like you’ve been a good husband and father?
Dr. Drew Pinksy: Yeah. My wife is the one who got me into the therapy. We have triplets so my life was very stressful. And one of the kids needed brain surgery when he was one. I think I must have been going insane with anxiety. And she calls one day and says, “you need to talk to somebody,” and I said “yeah yeah yeah, I would love to do that, someday I’m going to do that.” And she said, “no, listen to me. Now.” And she stopped me in my tracks and it was a great thing.
Ron Bennington: But we really don’t find out what kind of fathers we are till way after the fact.
Dr. Drew Pinksy: I think that’s probably true. My kids are all in college now, and they’re great.
Ron Bennington: But at some point they might be thirty and go “dude, I’m going to be the father you never were,” and you’re like what?
Dr. Drew Pinksy: I’m fully expecting that. And I hope that happens– I’ll be like job well done, finally some honesty from the kids. And the ghosts of your family of origin are always there. No family is perfect. In fact, if my kids felt it was perfect, that’s a problem. Because that’s an idealization that’s not reality.
Ron Bennington: It’s not easy being a human being.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: Especially now. We’ve lost track of the key ingredients of what makes life satisfying. I don’t want to say happiness, that word is grossly overused, but what makes it satisfying, worthwhile, nourishing. I mean nobody is happier than my heroin addicts after they take that first hit. That’s yahoo-hooo! They’re happy. People in this country want that kind of happiness all the time, but that ain’t happy.
Ron Bennington: That’s interesting– we do want happiness all the time…
Dr. Drew Pinsky: But we don’t know what that means, is the problem. I deal a lot with death and dying in my career. And when people are coming to end of life, the one thing that they’ll be coming to terms with is what made life meaningful. And of course, they’ll always say its important relationships. So real happiness– eudimonia– comes in an interpersonal context.
Ron Bennington: A lot of the stuff you deal with is people thinking that fame is going to be happiness.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: That’s just a compensation for trauma. Or narcissism. But usually trauma. That’s what my research shows. Fame is almost a bid to repair those traumatic things from the past.
Ron Bennington: And what kind of trauma occurred to people?
Dr. Drew Pinsky: The study we did, we had 250 celebrities or so, and there was not any uniform trauma. A lot of family stuff. Abandonment, neglect, moving, physical abuse, sexual abuse. Just a lot of different things. But real serious traumas. And people that come to celebrity– it’s why they don’t function well in relationships, it’s why they have higher incidences of addiction, why they have problems that we all look at “oh it must be because they’re a celebrity.” No, it’s that kind of person that strives to be a celebrity and in that environment they don’t have the same consequences and structure that the rest of us do so the stuff gets acted out further before it ever comes to being aware of it.
Ron Bennington: Some of your peers will say you play into the fame game. That you like being famous or you like being around famous people.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: I don’t like famous people particularly. I don’t like taking care of celebrities. I did it a lot because I lived in Los Angeles, and that’s how I got asked to do the celebrity rehab thing. I always wanted to put regular people in with the celebrity just to point out that everyone’s treated the same, and when you look at people, we just care about people. They’re all the same. We live a simple life out in Pasadena we don’t hang out with celebrity people. That’s why you don’t see me on TMZ.
Ron Bennington: I’ve had a few people on my show who have done your show– Heidi Fleiss, Tom Sizemore– both of them said I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Drew. But we don’t always hear that back when you talk about Celebrity Rehab because the people who didn’t make it get brought up.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: Severe drug addition is a terminal condition. People are going to die if you’re treating drug addicts. And I told people when they got into this show, somebody is going to die. It’s the nature of this condition. It’s a dangerous disorder and people don’t recognize that in this country. Out in the real world, when I’m treating patients, we’re lucky when we save people’s lives. When they recover, it’s a miracle.
Ron Bennington: I came up when drugs were drugs. Where now people feel like they’re getting medicine. And I’m like, ‘well you were doing the same shit that I used to cop.”
Dr. Drew Pinsky: Absolutely. My patients now, when they die, they die at the hands of my peers. They are on prescription meds given by well meaning people who don’t understand addiction.
Ron Bennington: When you say well meaning, how can you be a doctor handing out something and not knowing the consequences?
Dr. Drew Pinsky: Well they’ll say how can you be a doctor and let them suffer in their pain. I’m some kind of prehistoric maniac to insist on abstinence.
Ron Bennington: So how are we going to beat that?
Dr. Drew Pinsky: I scream about it on HLN all the time. Pharmaceutical addiction, and particularly young people–that’s where we’re losing ground. Talking about it, raising awareness I’m hoping will do something. But they will say “my pain my pain! You don’t understand my pain!” Well here’s something for you all to remember. Your pain will not get better on opiates. Especially if you’re an addict. Your brain learns that if you have pain it gets the drug. I can’t tell you how many times the standard patient I treat comes in– how’s your pain– 20 out of 10. What are you taking? Oxycontin, Fentonil, Morphine. All kinds, and the pain is still 20 out of 10. We take them off it and they go through two weeks of hell, horrible weeks that later they don’t even remember. And then you interview them two, three weeks later, how’s your pain? Always the same, on no meds, four out of ten. So this is the nature of the beast. But noone ever gives them that two weeks. By the way, to get an insurance company to pay for that two week opiate withdrawal– impossible.
Ron Bennington: And it’s very weird to know I could walk out of here, find a doctor, with my insurance program, and be able to cop.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: Yeah, five minutes.
Ron Bennington: But what do you do if you’re in recovery and you need…something happens, you get into an accident…
Dr. Drew Pinsky: I am not advocating suffering. What you do is, first you make sure you have your sponsor. So if you don’t have a sponsor Ron, we’ve got a problem already. And you talk to the surgeon or the trauma team ahead of time. Hopefully you don’t wake up on opiates. Let’s say it’s your appendix. You go, how many days am I going to need to be on the patient controlled anesthesia.. You’re going to need more than the average person because your system may be changed.. So patient controlled analgesia, as much as you need, for that first 48 hours that the surgeon agrees parentral opiates are required. Then after that, its on an as needed basis, oral. You have recovering people in the room with you as you make every decision because you will confuse anxiety, anticipation of pain, pain itself, and you need a recovering person there with you going, “come on Ron, is it really? How much? Think about it.” And that will diminish the pain, and when you go home you do not take a prescription of drugs. Somebody else takes it and you have nevermore access. And one day at a time. And if it goes more than a week or two you call someone like me in right away. Because now you are in trouble. And you will be amazed, you know Shelly, the blond woman on my program? She has a great story, waking up on opiates after an operation with the full thinking, disturbed, and distortions, the lying and the manipulations– completely conscious that she was doing all of this but couldn’t stop.
Ron Bennington: What’s hard, is, I’ve tried to even tell a dentist with a root canal, “how can we get around…” and the ignorance that rolls into that….
Dr. Drew Pinsky: It’s unbelievable. If you’re a recovering person, the medical system is a very dangerous place. Even as open and honest and clear as you can be, they don’t really understand what it is. They just don’t get it.
Ron Bennington: By the way, Shelly and Bob are just….Bob, I’ve never seen him make a move that didn’t make sense to me.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: I know he is a gem. I knew him back when he was a rock star and he was a severe drug addict. Get away from him, say your farewells because he is dangerous to be around, he’s going to die. Ten years later I was giving a lecture to the musician’s assistance program and there was a guy in the front row that looked like Bob Forrest but a very different Bob Forrest. And I was like wow that looks like Bob Forrest, but he’s dead so it couldn’t be Bob Forrest. And lo and behold it was him and I’ve been working with him ever since. Cultivated him, brought him in to the hospital, taught him how to work in a hospital. He’s just been a really sensational professional. But yeah, Shelly and Bob are people I need in order to be able to do my job.
Ron Bennington: Alright so you need to check this out, lctv.com.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: I’ve got to say what I came in for, which is the Nivea million moments of touch campaign. They feel people weren’t touching enough. So they’ve been giving money at their facebook site /niviausa to go out and spend time with people you love.
Ron Bennington: It’s funny how many people sit where you are, and don’t do the thing that you’re doing of just being in this moment. There are so many people that it’s hard for them to connect, even conversationally with another human being.
Dr. Drew Pinsky: No, they don’t know what that is. It goes back to what we were talking about with happiness. We think happiness is somewhere ‘out there’ with being a sports figure or making money or getting the right car. Happiness is right here. Right now this is making me happy, talking to you in a real, real way, and people don’t know about that .
Ron Bennington: And that’s the connection we should be looking for all the time. Just being in this spot. Well Drew, thanks so much for stopping by, and we’ll see you next time through.
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