Doug Thorburn on Early-Stage Alcohol and Drug Addiction

Michael Jackson: even if longstanding poly-drug addiction wasn't the proximate cause, he was enabled to his death. In Drunks, Drugs & Debits: How to Recognize Addicts and Avoid Financial Abuse, I wrote: “The higher an addict’s social status, the greater the enabling, because the enablers have more to lose….Enabling is the reason so many talented people—Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton and John Belushi—die young; they were ‘helped’ to their graves by those around them.” If they are to protect their positions of status, prestige and power, as well as incomes and wealth, close people can’t tell the addict he needs to stop drinking and using. Underlings can be too easily fired. Let’s not confuse this with blaming enablers for addiction, ...

James W. Von Brunn, Racist Octogenarian—and Alcoholic In Drunks, Drugs & Debits, I explained that the addicted ego can impel the addict to degrade, defile and ridicule others in an effort to build himself up. Sometimes this devolves into hatred, which can be directed against entire classes of people, as in racism or bigotry. I surmised that while not all racists and bigots are addicts, probably most are. Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver recanted his idea of a war between races only after he got sober. Former Governor George Wallace died “not drinking” with huge support among Blacks, who formerly had been the target of his racial epithets. Adolf Hitler was an amphetamine and barbiturate addict. As mentioned in How to ...

Runners-up for top story of the month: Jesse James Hollywood, accused of ordering the murder of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz in 2000 and finally standing trial in a Santa Barbara, California courtroom. In a classic case replete with addicts, Hollywood allegedly kidnapped Markowitz in August, 2000, in revenge over a $1,200 drug debt owed by his older half-brother, Ben Markowitz. According to prosecutors, after learning from his family’s lawyer that kidnapping can carry a life sentence, Hollywood gave his friend Ryan Hoyt a gun and car and told him to drive to Santa Barbara and “take care of business.” Hoyt was convicted of being the shooter and sentenced to death for the murder. In a truly bizarre case of distorted perceptions or ...

Under watch: In an early 2009 piece on white collar crime, The Economist magazine mentioned something those who have read my books would predict: “Many [Club Fed and other white collar] prisoners suddenly discover, post-conviction, that they had a drinking problem….” With this in mind, these are stories for which the evidence of alcoholism is in the behaviors themselves, even though absolute proof in public sources may be lacking. James William Lull, who failed to show up for sentencing in court in Hawaii after being convicted of scamming more than 50 investors out of $30 million in a Ponzi scheme because his car ripped through a barbed-wire fence and plunged 200 feet down a canyon, killing him. Lull, 60, while manager at ...

Alcoholic victims of the month: The rest of the human race apart from North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and his son Kim Jong Un, who has been anointed the next leader of the totalitarian socialist state by the elder Kim. Un is said to be competitive, proficient in English and, oh yes, a “heavy drinker” just like his alcoholic father. No wonder, according to Kim’s former Sushi chef Kenji Fujimoto, Un “acts just like his father and is [his] favorite.” As I wrote in the October 2004 TAR, the most dangerous people alive are alcoholic despots, especially those with access to weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, addicts are capable of anything (and I mean anything). North Korea just tested another nuclear ...

Co-dependents of the month: The San Francisco Zoo, which settled a lawsuit with two brothers who survived the Christmas Day 2007 tiger attack after they and their friend Carlos Sousa, Jr. taunted the tiger, reported in the January-February 2008 TAR. Carlos was killed, but Paul and Kulbir Dhaliwal, in whose car an empty bottle of vodka was found after the attack, are said to have raked in a cool $900,000. “Other” escapades, reported in the September-October 2008 issue of TAR, included several counts of felony shoplifting and imprisonment for violation of probation involving a high-speed chase for Paul and public drunkenness and resisting arrest for Kulbir. Most lotto winners run through their take within a few years; the addictionologist in me ...

“Alpha Dog” – superb portrayal of adolescent poly-drug addicts One critic described “Alpha Dog,” Nick Cassavetes’ thinly disguised story of the murder of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz for which Jesse James Hollywood is on trial, as a “glossy yet unflinching portrait of violent, hedonistic teenagers.” Johnny Truelove’s (Jesse James Hollywood’s) chain-smoking father Sonny (played by Bruce Willis) suggested “it’s all about parenting,” which is what Cassavetes suggested in several interviews. These are typical takes on a film that is, at its core, really about adolescent poly-drug addiction. The film is, at first, very difficult to watch. It is filled to the brim with profanities, tattoos, boozing, drugging, violence, screaming, reckless driving and addicts’ confabulations. The codependent (and probably alcoholic) parents are crazed, yet ...

Daughter abuse Dear Doug: Last year our family attended a large party given by my daughter and son-in-law. Having previously borne the brunt of my daughter’s violent temper, we hesitated to stay overnight—but did. Big mistake. The next morning, the swearing and raging at her father left him in tears. There was no contact between them until I received a long email from my daughter almost begging for a sign from her father that he wants her in his life. I forwarded the email to my husband and, hoping this was an opening for renewed contact, he called her. She immediately went into a rant about how he has ruined her life and slammed the phone in his ear. He was devastated. I’ve suggested ...

Myth of the Month: "We’re all squeamish about mental illness.” “It’s the psychiatric issues,” “it has to do with their distorted thinking and depression,” and “more than three-fourths of the offenders in 30 murder-suicides in the Cleveland, Ohio, area had signs of mental illness.” So reported a CNN.com article, “’Hopeless dads kill their families out of love,” on the recent spate of murder-suicides by family members, in its attempt to explain why familicide occurs. Cari Wheat, whose father Curt Wheat shot his wife, Marie, as she slept in their bedroom and then killed himself in 2003 explained, “We’re all squeamish about mental illness.” She believes her father pulled the trigger “out of a sense of love for her mother.” While an old ...

Alcoholic Antic-of-the-Month Story from “This is True” by Randy Cassingham, with his “tagline:” "RIGHT IN THE TOOL OF HIS TRADE: Lawyer Louis Brunoforte was having a beer at the Chic-A-Boom Room (no, really!) in Dunedin, Fla. When he came back from the restroom, a woman was sitting in his chair looking through her purse. He waited until she looked up. "She asked me if I had a problem," Brunoforte said. "I said, 'I'm just waiting for you to finish so I can sit in my chair.' She said, 'Oh, it's your chair? Has it been your chair forever?'" She then cursed him, so he cursed her back, and that's when the woman hit the 6-foot-tall, 240-pound attorney. "She cold-cocked me right in ...

In a recent piece on white-collar crime, The Economist magazine observed that “many [Club Fed and other white-collar] prisoners suddenly discover, post-conviction, that they had a drinking problem….” This should come as no surprise to our audience. In Drunks, Drugs & Debits: How to Recognize Addicts and Avoid Financial Abuse, I argue that 80-90% of criminals, including those who perpetrate white-collar crime, are addicts. Students of my books know how to use this simple idea to protect themselves from the financial devastation wrought by addicts. However, try proving the existence of alcoholism when it is so often hidden by both addicts and their enablers. As I wrote in the Top Story on Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and his wife ...

Runners-up for top story of the month: Lindolfo Thibes, sentenced to 109 years-to-life for sexually assaulting his daughter beginning when she was 6 years old and ultimately fathering her three children. What began as a domestic violence assault in a Las Vegas hospital parking lot in 2005, in which Thibes reportedly stabbed his “girlfriend,” ended up revealing a harrowing tale, in which the girl was found to be his daughter. He monitored her every move for over two decades using surveillance cameras and home imprisonment. He beat her fiercely during paranoid rages. The unnamed daughter, now 29, told authorities he plied her with alcohol and marijuana from the age of 8. While Thibes rambled off a litany of complaints to the ...

Alcoholic victims of the month: Angels rookie pitcher Nick Adenhart, 22, Courtney Frances Stewart, 20 and Henry Pearson, 25, who were killed and Jon Wilhite, 24, who survived, when Andrew Thomas Gallo, 22, blew through a red light at an estimated 65 mph in his Toyota Sienna minivan and broadsided a Mitsubishi Eclipse. Gallo, whose license had been revoked after a 2006 DUI conviction, fled on foot without checking on the victims. He was arrested 30 minutes later and charged with three counts of murder. Despite the fact that he was ordered to take alcohol education classes after his 2006 conviction, his BAL was .24 per cent, three times the legal limit and a level at which most non-addicts would have ...

Co-dependent of the month: Rihanna, whose tale of having been punched, bitten, threatened and choked by her R & B singer boyfriend Chris Brown was briefly told in the Feb-April 2009 TAR, explaining why she’s back with him: “He’ll hit me and feel bad afterward, but then he turns into the sweetest man and becomes my angel. He’ll cry like a little baby when he makes up to me, and that’s the part I love.” She admits, “I’d seen what alcohol and drugs had done to my dad [who was a crack cocaine addict] and I wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps.” Maybe not, but she’s clearly followed in her own way by substituting Brown for her father and thinking ...

Enablers of the month: Vincent Carroll, who reviewed Jeff Kass’s Columbine: A True Crime Story and Dave Cullen’s Columbine for The Wall Street Journal. Carroll doesn’t mention Eric Harris’s drug use, including the fact that his favorite drugs were vodka and whiskey. The implication is that neither book Carroll reviewed identified alcoholism as the root of the tragedy. I’d like to hope that someone who has read either of these books will prove me wrong. (Had TAR been in existence at the time, Harris and his apparently codependent friend Dylan Klebold would have been the Top Story of the Year. They were mentioned in the April-May 2007 issue of TAR in the Top Story on the mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho, who ...