Running with Monsters

by Bob Forrest

  “No. The show sucked. It was terrible because of you.”

  I stood there shocked. I thought I had been the best part of the night’s entertainment.

  “You didn’t even make sense,” the exasperated producer said. “And I know why you kept leaving. I mean, have you taken a look at yourself lately? Drew thinks you have fuckin’ AIDS, man.”

  I started to argue but was cut off. “Man—”

  “So until you get yourself un-fucked and get your shit together, we don’t want or need you here.”

  And that was that. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t need the show. It’s not like they paid me or anything. Fine. Whatever. I stomped out and didn’t return. So much for my charming personality.

  In 1997 or 1998, Bill Nye “the Science Guy” from TV organized a lecture with MAP for a series he was doing on addiction. It was at the Sheraton Universal in Universal City and I went to listen. I plopped down in the front row. Nye did his thing and then brought out a guest to speak about treatment methods. It was Drew. He lectured the crowd of about twenty people in his earnest manner and then opened things up for questions. I had a few.

  “Can a nonaddict ever truly reach an addict?”

  “Why is the recovery rate for traditional treatment programs so abysmally low?”

  Drew answered all my questions, but I had the distinct impression that he didn’t remember me. How could that be? I had done all those radio appearances with him. When the lecture was over, I approached him.

  “How’ve you been, Drew?” I asked.

  “Good, good. You sure ask a lot of questions. Have we met?”

  “Drew, it’s me. Bob Forrest. You don’t remember me?”

  A look of surprise washed over his face. He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost. Little did I know …

  “Bob Forrest? I thought you were dead.”

  “Come on, Drew. The hat. The glasses. Who else would it be?”

  “I thought it was just … Holy crap, Bob, you look great! I mean, I’ve seen the transitions that addicts can make, but I’m looking at a miracle.”

  “Look, I know you’re at Las Encinas. I wonder if there’s any work available for me over there.”

  “Did you go to school, Bob?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, but I did a fast-track program,” I said as honestly as I could. “But I’ve done lots of fieldwork.”

  He must have seen something in me, because he invited me to interview at Las Encinas. I showed up the next week and Drew laid it out for me.

  “Bob, what you’re doing now is beyond your expertise and training. I can bring you along here. Consider this ‘the education of Bob Forrest.’ I’ll make you an administrator. You’re going to learn how sick people work, and if you stick with it and give it all you’ve got—and read the books—you’ll end up running a program.”

  I was scared to death when I went to work with Drew because I knew that I didn’t know enough. More important, Drew knew it too. I couldn’t fake it and I was unprepared. When it came to the clinical stuff, the medical and the psychological jargon, I was lost. Drew encouraged me. “If you don’t know something, Bob, ask,” he’d say. When we’d have staff meetings and people talked in an alphabet soup of acronyms and clinical terms, Drew said, “Get a medical dictionary and highlight pen. Look up words you don’t understand. There’s a lot that happens in these meetings and you won’t get any of it if you can’t understand what we say.” It was a learning process that took years.

  But I was good with patients. I could keep addicts in a program even when they wanted to bolt. I calmed the friction that sometimes blew people out of rehab.

  “Bob, this place sucks. I can’t take it here.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  It could be almost anything. “They don’t treat me right. They talk down to me. They’re late with my medication. They told me I couldn’t smoke over in that area.”

  “Well, look. I can see your point, but come on. Those are the reasons why you want to leave? You want to leave because you want to get high. And if you leave now, you’ll be high within twenty-four hours. Guaranteed.”

  The thing that I’ve found is that addicts have an almost unwavering belief in the righteousness of their arguments and complaints. About everything. And a lot of the time, they are right. I’ll take their side against the facility. But my job is to get them to see that the real issue at play isn’t some supposed slight or a restriction, but that those are just excuses to give in to the disease. If you throw bullshit at a patient, they’ll leave. If you show some compassion and they can see that you’re straight with them, most of the time, they’ll stay.

  I also learned that there was an underlying problem with addiction: personality disorder. It often leads to self-medicating, which often leads to addiction. And unless a person’s sober, they can’t begin to work on that successfully. I knew that from my own experiences. I started to see connections between my work and my personal history, although it took me a while to recognize them. When I was at Las Encinas, they’d send me to the locked ward to do consultations. I’d go and evaluate the patient.

  “What do you think, Bob?” Drew would ask.

  “That girl’s just another addict! She could be any one of us.”

  “Bob, there are other psychiatric conditions besides addiction, and you have to sort those things out.”

  “No, no. She’s been completely adulterated by medications. She’s an addict and needs recovery.”

  “Bob, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

  However, he did respect my belief that for a lot of patients, medicine was overdone and overprescribed. Drug addicts used to populate the fringes of society, and they slipped in and out of a shadowy world most people didn’t even know existed, or, if they did, they didn’t know where to find it. Now you see great, wonderful people—young, old, in between—from all walks of life who desperately scuttle about to maintain that buzz, and in the process, sometimes they overdose and die. It’s a shameful thing and it gets worse every year. An entire industry keeps people doped and drugged and reaps huge profits under the guise of modern medicine.

  And growing right alongside the pharmaceutical industry is the business of rehabilitation. My experiences through more than twenty different rehab programs have given me more than a little bit of insight into the game. Far too often, rehab just sells a commodity—sobriety—in the same sleazy, cynical way a late-night TV pitchman hawks used cars. And, like those cars, sobriety’s often a shoddy product. What else would you call something with such a spectacular failure rate? A lot of the time it looks like a straight con job. A distraught parent or relative calls up to say, “I have a loved one who’s an addict! I don’t know what to do!” The calm voice on the line says, “You have to get them into treatment immediately. If you don’t, they’ll die. We have a bed waiting.” Now, that’s a heavy thing to lay on a near-hysterical person. When a thirty-day stay can cost tens of thousands of dollars—or more—and insurance won’t cover it, then what? Well, your understanding friend on the end of the line will just transfer you over to the facility’s very own credit bureau, which will advise you about mortgaging your home to pay for treatment—which may or may not do your loved one any good at all. But those beds have to stay occupied and the facility gets its cut whether the program succeeds or not. I frequently find myself questioning the ethics of this business.

  People in the rehab industry want to make money just like everybody else who works for a paycheck, but too often they get greedy. I’ve never been overly concerned about how much money I could make at this. I want to get paid too. This is, after all, a job I do. But I don’t feel the need to make millions of dollars. And if you think I couldn’t make that kind of money in this industry now, you’re nuts. I just couldn’t live with myself if what I did was con families out of a huge fee and exploit their fear and desperation.

  At times, it seems that much of the recovery industry is riddled with corruption. You can�
�t trust anybody. Celebrities, especially, have it tough when they seek treatment. Not only are they ridiculed in the press and popular culture, they’re often exploited and their confidentiality as patients is violated. Any program that treats an A-list star can get put on the map by that one famous client. One of the reasons I chose Hazelden as my first rehab facility was because Elizabeth Taylor had gone there. Some of these places are prepared to leak that information to the press, although it doesn’t always happen that directly. Some hospitals have publicity and advertising departments that exist solely for the purpose of exploiting this kind of information. Worse, staff and patients have been known to sell out their celebrity clients to the tabloid press in order to flip a quick buck. Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler once told me he had been in the Priory—a well-known, high-end London clinic—for treatment and his roommate had sold the intimate details of Steven’s stay to one of the big British tabloids—which all too happily published the salaciously edited details.

  Almost worse is that in the effort to keep celebrity patients in the facility and to exploit them as powerful marketing tools, the stars are allowed to get away with the most outrageous kinds of behavior—things that would get a civilian patient bounced to the curb immediately. It took me several stays in different facilities to begin to learn how to game the system, but a big star doesn’t have to do that. By the end of the first day they know their status and money can get them special treatment. Sometimes, they can figure that out before they even arrive.

  I’ve heard outrageous stories, and I know they’re true. Some rehab facilities—the kind that dispense daily back rubs and keep their celebrity patients on a “replacement drug” treatment—will allow their famous clients to dictate the terms under which they’ll stay. One well-known pop singer once rented all the beds in an entire wing of a certain Southern California beach-side center just so she could be by herself. What kind of place would allow that? That’s not how we do it. It doesn’t matter who you are. Here at Pasadena Recovery Center, you have a roommate. We know what works. We know how to treat drug addiction and the patients don’t. We realize that as a well-off, world-famous entertainer, these people haven’t had to have a roommate for many years—if ever—but it’s part of the process here. Now, I won’t say that we don’t make certain accommodations and allowances. When you have a celebrity in treatment it changes the dynamic of the relationship with the other patients. You have to address it. You can’t ignore the fact that news helicopters are flying overhead and there are roving packs of paparazzi circling the streets and climbing the trees on the perimeter. That has to be dealt with for everybody’s sake.

  In 2010, I felt that I could do more good operating an outpatient program, so I started Hollywood Recovery Services from the 1924-vintage, twelve-story Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine. I patterned the setup after Buddy Arnold’s Musicians Assistance Program, which helped me so much. Since it was an outpatient facility, we didn’t have to worry about keeping “heads on beds” and we avoided a lot of the business headaches I tend to associate with the “recovery industry.” However, it was a business, and like all startups, it would take a while to see a profit. I took on a financial backer.

  Maybe I should have been a little more discerning. My backer was a longtime heavyweight in the Los Angeles pornography industry who had found salvation for himself and some of his immediate family through recovery meetings. He was a gung-ho devotee of the philosophy and he liked my idea to start a program. He also liked that we had a track record through the television show, which I’ll tell you all about in the next chapter. We had worked with some notoriously difficult cases in front of the cameras that had caught his eye. In particular, the actor Jeff Conaway. His appearance on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew was tragic. He was belligerent and half-crippled, a sad, lost soul a million miles removed from Kenickie, the singing, dancing golden-boy hood he had played in the movie Grease. He was an addict and had been for a long time. His attempts to clean up had failed and when he checked in, he was close to total collapse from the previous night’s coke-and-whiskey binge and practically an invalid from a long-term back injury. It was painful to see any human in this condition and so desperate and in need of help, but, even so, he had a fighter’s spirit and a junkie’s fatalism. His outbursts made audiences tune in and our backer saw how hard Drew, Shelly Sprague, and I had worked to help him. Our team had a certain marquee value that appealed to our benefactor. Unfortunately, he came from an industry accustomed to quick profits that far exceeded the investment costs. It also didn’t help that Porn Incorporated was caught in an epic tailspin brought on by the Great Recession and the proliferation of freely available smut on the Internet. We folded in 2012. When the call came to inform me that our sponsor was ending our partnership, he didn’t even have the decency to make it himself. He had an underling do it.

  “Bob? There’s going to be no more funding.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to need you to clear out the suite and turn in your keys. We’re also going to need you to give back the car we leased for you.”

  There was no point in arguing. It was over. “Okay, I’ll have it all wrapped up by the end of the month.”

  “Oh, no. That won’t work. We’ll need you out and the car back in five days.”

  And that was that. We closed up shop. Porn barons are profit-driven. Extremely so. It was a noble experiment and it could have worked given time to grow. Two years just wasn’t long enough. I like to think we could have made a difference, but addiction treatment is a tricky thing. No one, and I mean no one, is ever going to successfully beat the monster that is a drug or alcohol habit until they want sobriety for themselves. I can lead, I can show the way, but if they’re not ready for what I have to offer, I advise them to stay away until they are. Do you want to know the real secret to sobriety that I’ve learned after all these years of rough-and-tumble personal experience? The main one is this: Don’t drink and don’t take drugs. You can mainline that as the straight dope.

  SHOWTIME

  In February of 2007, I had spent a long day at Las Encinas counseling my clients. Twelve straight hours dealing with the pain and frustration of addiction. Beyond that, they’d suffered additional traumas. Childhood violence, sexual abuse, personality disorders. I had listened to this litany of hurts and had tried to maintain my professional distance, but these were real people and I was affected by their stories. One kid in particular had gotten to me, an eighteen-year-old stoner with a harrowing history. A product of alcoholic parents, he had spent most of his teens numbing himself with whatever substances he could get his hands on. He had recently graduated to OxyContin that he bought on the streets for $20 per ten milligrams. His home life had been a wreck given that his father’s favorite form of recreation wasn’t golf or bowling but long sessions dedicated to the development of a wicked left jab. He didn’t need a heavy bag. He had a son.

  The kid had an acute sense of self-awareness. “I know I’m a mess, Bob,” he said. “And I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Getting high won’t help that,” I said.

  “It’s the only thing I’m good at,” he said, and it was heartbreaking.

  I was still thinking about him when I arrived home. He needed rehabilitation and he was at the right place. I hoped he would stay and complete the work, but I wasn’t sure. I felt a sense of relief when the key to my front door slid into the lock. I just wanted to unwind and catch my breath. I tossed my keys on the coffee table and turned on the television. I flopped down on the couch just in time to catch Jay Leno as he delivered his monologue. All the news of the day, told in Leno’s nasal whine and given the humor treatment, only it didn’t make me laugh. It made me angry. Rehab, addicts, and troubled celebrities were fertile territory for the funnyman, and it was a trend I had started to see filter into the popular culture. Rehab and recovery had become jokes.

  Celebrities and their troubled relationships with the bottle and drugs had long been f
odder for the supermarket tabloids. Actors like Robert Downey Jr., Drew Barrymore, and Shannen Doherty and their doped or drunken public antics provided splashy, breathless front-page stories for outlets like the National Enquirer. These kinds of stories gained even more traction with the advent of the Internet and its countless sites devoted to celebrity gossip. Just look at what happened with Britney Spears. She had, for nearly a decade, been America’s pop princess, and she had come a long way from her days on Disney’s rebooted version of The Mickey Mouse Club. After she broke through to the pop market and cemented her image as a teenage entertainer who walked the razor edge between sultry and innocent, she was constantly in the public eye. To get where she was—and it makes no difference whether you like her music or not—she had put in a lot of hard work. But in February of 2007, some major cracks started to show through her carefully crafted public persona. She checked in to—and then almost immediately out of—a drug-rehabilitation center on the island of Antigua, and now, back home in Los Angeles, she had been followed by the paparazzi vampire squad and caught in a very public meltdown. She walked into a Tarzana, California, hair salon and grabbed a pair of clippers and gave herself a number-0 buzz cut that was a throwback to Sinead O’Connor’s. Following that, she attacked a photographer’s SUV with a large umbrella. She checked into Promises Malibu treatment center, a sort of posh country club for celebrities in recovery. Again, she didn’t stay long. Everything she did was captured on film and written about. And, given the nature of the Internet and the gossip press’s hunger for celebrity scandal, she became an overnight laughingstock. Britney’s troubles peaked when she was eventually taken out of her home on a stretcher and carted off in an ambulance for another rehab stint while news copters whirled overhead and photographers on the ground snapped pictures. And there was Leno, who got a big laugh when he said, “Apparently, Guantánamo Bay has the same success rate as the Promises rehab center in Malibu.”