Examining Rehab 2 With Dr. Drew – Episode 1

As he did last season, Dr. Drew is providing the VH1 Blog with scene-specific episode commentary for each episode of Celebrity Rehab. Below much like he did in the premiere, Drew takes on each of his new patients and gives us his initial impressions of them. Drew told us there’s a “range of pathologies” this time around, though watching the show, it almost feels more like a smorgasboard.

First up is Gary, who seems to come in with a chip on his shoulder.

He has a confused idea of what’s going to happen, what treatment is, what the experience is going to be about. You can’t be a staff member unless you have a license and have applied to be a staff member. It’s sort of confusing for him. But he ultimately does a great job of getting people to open up. It takes a while for him to get with it.

It seems like he’s motivated by entitlement.

Yeah, there’s a grandiosity there…I don’t want to disparage him. I think he genuinely wants to help and genuinely has some serious organic brain problems. And we work through that in treatment. It turns out it has a great deal to do with why he is the way he is. He doesn’t perceive accurately how he’s perceived by others.

He mentions using medicinal marijuana. Does marijuana’s legal status in California throw a kink into the treatment process?

It’s horrible. Every patient I treat now comes in with a marijuana prescription. It’s a pain in the ass, I gotta tell ya. In Southern California, they don’t even ask questions, they just hand over a prescription.

In your experience, is it possible to be sober and take marijuana medicinally?

For an addict? No. Addicts don’t do anything medicinally that has addictive potential. The fact is that if they’re using something that activates their reward system, their disease is fully activated. Their thinking is distorted, their motivations are distorted and it just happens to be a drug they can’t take. If they have cancer or something and don’t care, I’m all for it. Fine: take morphine, too, if it helps. But in terms of living a full life, no. That’s not an option.

Amber is particularly heartbreaking.

What do you mean?

When I look at her, I get sad. She seems so sad.

She is. She’s been using since she was a teenager. She had a horribly abusive father. Her mother is an addict, who got her going on drugs. The mom’s story is very interesting, actually. We go through a whole ordeal with her, because by treating the mom, it makes it possible to treat Amber.

Her pill case is vast.

Isn’t that wild? That’s the addict of our day, the pharmaceutical addict. Patients die everyday of this. I mean, Tawny is another one who’s in denial of the implications of all those meds she’s taking.

How about Rodney?

How ’bout Rodney? He’s a horrible addict, alcoholic, and he’s one of the most delightful humans you could ever wish to meet when he’s sober. He really has to stay around the program. If he drifts from people in the program, he starts using. It’s bad.

Immediately, you attempt to engage him in a conversation about the beating.

That’s producer stuff. I don’t set an agenda. The producers wanted me to seem as though I wanted to. A lot of that’s editing, too, the v.o. of me going, “Oh, I was surprised he didn’t want to bring this up.” No I wasn’t. I wasn’t surprised at all. That’s the only little bit of b.s. in the show right there.

Normally, you’d wait till someone was comfortable enough to talk about that, right?

Yeah, I’d wait however long. I don’t push those things. When they come up, they come up. For some reason, they thought it was essential that we establish that, and since I didn’t think it changed the substance of the show or treatment, I let it happen.

Tawny comes in under the guise of sobriety.

She’s in denial. It’s very common. People call themselves sober and they’re still smoking pot or taking sleeping pills or anti-anxiety medication and their disease is alive and well.

Is that at all a result from the lack of a stigma on legal drugs, versus the way illegal ones are socially unacceptable?

There’s that. Some of it’s genuine naïveté, too. Bottom line is that addicts will take any opportunity. That’s how the disease works.

How about Steven?

We had to go get him before we started shooting because he got so sick, we had to put him in a psychiatric hospital. He was actively suicidal, he was medically ill and I knew he had to go then. He did well initially. Way better than I would have predicted.

He’s been using since he was 11…

The history speaks for itself: using so much that he disturbed the members of Guns ‘n Roses. That’s really using.

You say that he’s still that 11-year-old developmentally. What happens when you take the drugs away and you have a man-child? Can they develop beyond that?

They can. That’s part of the process for many addicts. Most marijuana addicts are like that – they start smoking at 15 and they stop developing at 15. All of a sudden, we have a 30-year-old who’s developmentally 15. In Steven’s case, since he was so young, there’s a lot of very rigid and distorted thinking. It’s only recently started to lighten up a little bit.

And there’s Sean, whom you’ve treated before.

One thing that I haven’t gotten the chance to say publicly about Sean is that he is so much better than when Bob and I saw him five years ago. We couldn’t believe it. We were glad to see that, but he still has deep levels of resistance. My basic message to Sean is that he needs to own his life. Until he does that, he’s never going to be his own person.

The fact that he’s a recurring patient after so long made me wonder if there’s any point where you throw up your hands and give up on treating a patient.

I’m getting close to that with Seth Binzer. It’s not that I can’t treat him. If I become part of the disease, if my program becomes a place where people go to hide out and get patched back together physically so that they can use again, that’s when I stop treating people. But then, there are people whom I feel like come in to do work, but don’t do what they have to do. That’s sad.

Is it a frequent occurrence that you find yourself cutting someone off?

It happens more often than I’d like. We call it the resistant, non-surrendered addict. It’s just like, you have to go back out there and get ready to surrender. When you’re ready to surrender, we can help you. It’s really a controversial area. What do you do with somebody that just never gets it and seems unwilling to change? Do you just let them die? Do you just not treat them? There are many people out there who believe in many different methods, like placing people in intensive psychotherapy, and we don’t think that works. It makes them chronic patients. But at the same time, if it keeps them alive…well, OK. I can’t be too critical.

What about Nikki?

She’s awesome. She’s sort of our Jessica this year. She is very sick, a severe addict and alcoholic. She’s got lots of heavy trauma that comes out in treatment. But God bless her, she really throws herself into the treatment process. She lights up the groups everyday. I heard some very inspiring things about her just today, in fact. She did this Us magazine interview and it was very evocative for her emotionally and in response to that, she’s gone to more meetings. That’s exactly what she should do. How great.

And then there’s Jeff and Vicki, who really just seem like they’re doing a song-and-dance when they arrive.

Yes. It seems that she’s there to be on camera, right? We knew that, and anyway the reality is that you can’t treat a couple together. We made that clear and goddammit, Vicki accepted our invitation to get treatment next door. And you’ll see eventually why that becomes a major problem.

Which season was more intense?

This one. It’s heavier lifting. But for me, the payoff is greater, too. That was surprising. I wasn’t sure that it would be. People really did some nice work. That’s the good news. You watch the early episodes and it’s like, “Oh wow, that’s really dramatic.” But at the end of the day, they really got into the game.

For even more Dr. Drew commentary, watch his Episode 1 video recap here. And to see more extreme stills from the show, check out the screen-shot gallery below.