Is Dr. Drew Too Dangerous for Prime Time?

Continued from previous page

This is apparently news to Dr. Drew, who tells patients that “methadone takes your soul away,” which can’t mean that he thinks methadone is consistent with sobriety. When questioned about this statement, he  told VH-1, “If you get enough for it to work, you’re just on the couch. You can’t do anything.”

“That’s completely false,” O’Brien says. “We’ve had people on methadone going back to school, practicing law. There's hard evidence that methadone saves lives and probably a lot of souls, too.”

Pinsky discourages not only methadone but also maintenance with buprenorphine (Suboxone, Subutex), which is also consistent with sobriety if used as prescribed, according to the Betty Ford consensus. Indeed, Hazelden itself—the originator of the 28-day abstinence-based model on which Dr. Drew’s program is based—has recently begun offering buprenorphine maintenance. It had found that too many people were dying of overdose following treatment, so it changed its practices based on the data. Three of the five deaths following Celebrity Rehab have involved opioid relapses that might have been prevented by maintenance.

But Dr. Drew  insists—again contrary to NIDA guidelines—that buprenorphine “is supposed to be a medication for outpatient detox,” not a maintenance drug. NIDA  says, “Buprenorphine has been approved to treat opiate addiction, reducing withdrawal symptoms and preventing relapse without producing euphoria or sedation.”

Still, on an  episode of Sober House 2, a counselor can be seen taking buprenorphine away from Starr, calling it “the root of all evil.” While Starr had been using crack and other substances as well as his maintenance drugs, experts say that he could have been detoxed from them while on methadone or buprenorphine.

“Where I get really annoyed is when people say that they ‘don’t believe in’ medication or that it’s ‘against my philosophy,’” O’Brien says. “That’s not scientific. Maintenance has saved thousands of lives. People who have this prejudice are engaging in unethical behavior.”

And sadly, the deviations from recommended treatment on Celebrity Rehab don’t stop there. In  episode two of season three, McCready and fellow patient Dennis Rodman were taken for brain scans, purportedly to show them how much their addictions have damaged their brains and the harm that will result if they relapse.

“We do a lot of research with brain scans but we don’t claim this has any role in treatment at the present time,” O’Brien says. There’s no way currently of knowing what the scans really mean for recovery. However, on Celebrity Rehab, patients are told that their brains are damaged. The intention is apparently to use fear of the negative consequences to strengthen their resistance to relapse. But this exposure to their own brain damage could make them hopeless about their ability to avoid relapse instead.

If someone were providing care on national TV for years that was as far away from what experts recommend for any other condition, it wouldn’t take a journalist to bring the misleading claims to the experts for debunking, especially after someone dies. But addiction still isn’t really seen as a disease where research evidence should determine the best treatment. Instead, it’s a matter of “philosophy” and faith. You can say, “Methadone steals your soul,” and still get a national TV show and be quoted every time a celebrity relapses—and no one even reports until after a death that all of the major bodies on addiction medicine disagree.

While the choices that McCready, Starr and others made after leaving treatment are clearly their own and cannot simply be blamed on any treatment provider, insistence that a return to any form of maintenance treatment is a failure and that there are no alternatives to the 12-step program of abstinence certainly does not offer hope to patients. If they begin to find the pain unbearable and do not find the steps useful, they may believe they have nowhere else to turn but back to drugs.