Little Miss Rehab

Lindsay Lohan, Kate Moss, Miss USA Tara Conner? When I went to rehab (on June 29, 1989) there weren't nearly so many hot women. Or any. Actually, my roommate in rehab was a 6-foot-7 African American crackhead with cystic acne who slept with Noxzema on his face and--I kid you not --a Confederate flag do-rag wrapped around his head. It pleased me no end that this should be the fate of the sacred standard of the South's secret society. Emmett, by the way, was absolutely the nicest guy to have ever sold his plasma for a rock of cocaine.

In those days, residential drug rehabilitation therapy was reserved for people who had real problems. Like the yellow-faced 50-year-old alcoholic with pancreatitis so bad his organs bulged out from under his rib cage. I remember sitting in group with him. The counselor told him if he didn't quit drinking he was going to die. He responded with something like "Yup."

Not to be melodramatic about it, but rehab, and a certain anonymous program I'm not at liberty to mention, saved my life. No, that's too much. I wasn't smoking crack or shooting heroin between my toes. It's nearer the mark to say rehab saved me from a life of diminished expectations and downwardly spiraling returns, a life that would have almost certainly ended in a stoned tragic-comic misadventure--say, being electrocuted while trying to hook up my hi-fi to a ceiling fan.

In any event, I feel something like proprietary outrage when I see rehab and the larger ambit of recovery so cynically exploited by celebs and their damage-controlling publicists. Most recently, Lohan has been pioneering the field of drive-by rehab, coming and going from the ostensibly residential Wonderland Center facility in Laurel Canyon for trips home, shopping and partying. It was reported that LiLo's peripatetic ways severely chapped the hides of fellow Wonderland clients. "I'm trying to save my life," tmz.com quoted an anonymous source, "she's trying to save her face."

Anyone who has ever walked the walk of addiction and recovery can instantly spot the problem. It's hard to convince a young, beautiful person with a publicist, an agent, two personal assistants and seven figures in the bank that they are powerless. Your life has not become unmanageable if you've hired people to manage it. This was not a contingency Dr. Bob and Bill W., the founders of AA, could have anticipated.