November 22, 2008 at 4:10 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Alcoholic victims of the month:
"American Idol"star Jennifer Hudson's mother Darnell Donerson, brother Jason Hudson and nephew Julian King, who are believed to have been murdered by William Balfour, the estranged husband of Jennifer's sister, Julia Hudson. Balfour, who was on parole since May 2006 after serving seven years on charges of attempted murder and carjacking, was kicked out of Julia's home in May because of alleged drug dealing. Furious, he vowed to Julia that he'd kill her and the rest of the family if she "didn't stop messin' in his life."He threatened to kidnap Julia's son Julian and kill him. While it's true that we generally shouldn't believe addicts, there is one exception: if they threaten you, believe them. The ...
Permalink
November 22, 2008 at 4:09 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Disenablers of the month:
Casey Anthony's father, George Anthony, who has reportedly admitted to police having grave doubts about Casey's innocence over the disappearance of his granddaughter Caylee. He seems shaken over the fact that he has caught his daughter in lies that border on the delusional, including her telling a friend her father had suffered a stroke, was divorcing his wife Cindy and was turning over their home to Casey. Armed with fabricated work sheets, phony emails and dummied-up date books, Casey convinced her parents she was an event planner at Universal Studios, when in fact she hadn't worked in two years.
LaVelda Conrad's daughters, Kaja, 25, Camille, 23 and Chelsea, 21, who reported LaVelda for cocaine possession to authorities, which ...
Permalink
November 22, 2008 at 4:07 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
DeWayne McKinney, 47, killed when he crashed his moped into a bus stop sign and utility pole in Hawaii with a BAL of .22 per cent. McKinney had been released from incarceration in 2000 after being wrongly convicted of a 1980 robbery-murder at a Burger King in Orange, California and, amazingly, expressed no anger or bitterness. Instead, he spoke at churches about the faith that carried him through his years in prison and even met the judge who sentenced him and the prosecutor in the case, accepting an apology and a hug from the judge and endorsing the reelection campaign of the prosecutor. He won a $1 million settlement in 2002 and parlayed it into a ...
Permalink
November 22, 2008 at 4:06 pm ·
Filed under 2 - Movie & Book Reviews
Rolling Stone, which is mostly a pseudo-liberal mouthpiece (spoken by a practically life-long libertarian with no affinity for either so-called liberals or conservatives or their political parties), occasionally has an article that makes a subscription worthwhile for the addiction-aware. Its recent expose of Senator John McCain's troubled past shed light on behavioral indications of alcoholism that couldn't be found elsewhere in concise format (even if we still can't be sure whether the behaviors are best explained by his own alcoholism or psychological, emotional and intellectual abandonment by his alcoholic father). Along similar lines, I'd read a number of obituaries on writer David Foster Wallace mentioning his struggle with depression, but never alluding to what turns out to have been long-standing ...
Permalink
November 22, 2008 at 4:04 pm ·
Filed under 3 - Dear Doug...
Party animal
Dear Doug:
We live in a nice neighborhood and are immediately adjacent to a community park. Once a year, on "community day"at the park featuring rides for children, ethnic food and fireworks, we open our home to family, friends and neighbors. We provide food and refreshments, including some adult beverages.
Each year, one of the neighbors, John, tries to set a new personal drinking record. He begins drinking early in the day (starting with his own bottle) and by afternoon he is slurring and staggering. He openly pops prescription pills with the booze. He eventually embarrasses everyone by becoming rude, obnoxious and obscene. We've asked John to behave, but to no avail. We think we'll never hear the end of it ...
Permalink
November 22, 2008 at 4:02 pm ·
Filed under 4 - Alcoholic Myth of the Month
"Considering the horrors McKinney endured in prison…
it's not surprising that he turned to alcohol.â€
So said Nancy Clark, an Orange County woman who runs treatment programs for recovering addicts. She had been touched by the story of DeWayne McKinney's wrongful conviction, reported under "sometimes it takes an addict"in the Top Story section, and let him live in an apartment rent-free after his release from prison.
No, Ms. Clark"and you should know better. While stress, including the stress of horrors, can trigger relapses, they do not cause alcoholic biochemistry. Excusing an addict for drinking due to the stresses of life invites a relapse. If we are to reduce its likelihood, the disease must be described as one that causes a loss of control ...
Permalink
November 22, 2008 at 4:00 pm ·
Filed under 5 - Amazing Alcoholic Antics
Todd Mellon, 34, suffered second-degree burns to his hands, face, legs and neck after attempting, according to Officer Steven Burroughs, to "light a cigarette."He wrote in his report, "The chemicals in the air exploded, causing all the door windows to blow out."His friend Brian Kelly, 19, with whom he had been huffing five aerosol cans of computer cleaner, suffered second-degree burns to his chest, neck and face. One of the police officers was taken to a nearby medical center after breathing some of the fumes at the incident scene. Imagine, the fumes, after the windows were blown out, after waiting for police to arrive, were still potent enough to adversely affect the officer.
The huffers win the Antic-of-the-Month award because they ...
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:27 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Presidential Contenders: Sons of Alcoholics
Presidential contenders Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain may be members of different parties, hold opposite views on many subjects and have very different ancestral backgrounds. They have, however, one key similarity: they are both sons of alcoholics.
Barack Obama Sr. met Ann Dunham while both were studying at the University of Hawaii in 1959. In 1962, a year after their son was born, Barack Sr. won a graduate scholarship to Harvard and left, never to return. Sen. Barack Obama was abandoned by his father before he was old enough to remember him.
While earning a masters degree in economics at Harvard, Obama Sr. became a fixture in bars, chain-smoking and ordering scotch straight up by the ...
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:24 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Runners-up for top story of the month:
O.J. Simpson, 61, who finally got his comeuppance by being convicted on all counts of armed robbery in a trial involving, as I wrote in the October 2007 edition of the Thorburn Addiction Report, a cast of characters consisting solely of other likely alcoholics. Most commentators were amazed when he broke into the hotel room to "take back"his memorabilia from sports collectors. I wrote that if one is to understand O.J., one must grasp the concept of alcoholic egomania, which compels the addict to wield power over others. This accounts for O.J.'s success on the playing field and as an actor, because success facilitates the use of power. It also sheds light on a ...
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:23 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Under watch:
Con man Daniel Heath, 51, sentenced to 127 years in prison on 400 counts, including grand theft, elderly abuse and filing false tax returns, for running a $180 million investment scam that bilked many of at least 1,800 elderly investors of their life savings. In classic Ponzi-like fashion, Heath, along with his late, possibly codependent, father John Heath, and Dennis T. O'Brien, 53, funneled money from new investors to pay off early investors. The scam dated to the early 1990s, when Daniel W. Heath & Associates lured clients to "free lunch"seminars where they were told their money would go into fixed income investments with little or no risk. Instead, it went into high-risk real estate and small business projects.
I ...
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:21 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Headline of the month:
"Jobless dad kills 5, himself"; also, "Father kills family and himself, despondent over financial losses"
We may as well get used to headlines like these which refer, in this case, to the murder-suicide by Karthik Rajaram, 45, as the unwinding of the great credit bubble proceeds. Unfortunately, they will be mostly misleading and thereby fail to help prevent future similar tragedies.
As regular readers know, almost all crime"especially murder"is rooted in alcoholism. Many suicides also have their source in this disease. Readers of "Drunks, Drugs & Debits" (with thanks to James Graham's "The Secret History of Alcoholism") also understand that desperate measures are sometimes taken to compensate for a deflating ego. As wealth contracts, leaving the alcoholic less able ...
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:20 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Co-alcoholics of the month:
Ed McMahon, who had trouble selling his home partly because it's just off Mulholland Drive near an area where photographers wait for shots of one of his neighbors, pop singer full-blown poly-drug addict Britney Spears. McMahon purchased the home in 1990 for $2.6 million. He listed it near the peak of the housing bubble for $7 million and only recently reduced the asking price to the approximately $4.6 million he owes on the home. McMahon, who plight is recounted in the July 2008 issue of TAR is yet another example of an alcoholic harmed by another alcoholic.
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:19 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Enablers of the month:
Donald Trump, who announced he will purchase Ed McMahon's home and lease it back to him. That's very sweet, Donald, but you don't seem to understand what you're doing. How do we know this? Because you asked, "How could this happen?"Donald, Ed McMahon dug himself into this hole because of his alcoholism. He's reportedly been sober for a decade, but recent history suggests otherwise. He won a lawsuit with his insurer over mold and lost THAT fortune after squandering millions from being Johnny's sidekick. He borrowed an additional $250,000 in July 2006 at an annual interest rate of 15%, suggesting there were serious financial problems before he injured himself so badly he couldn't continue to work"at age ...
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:18 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Disenabler of the month:
Paparazzi Jill Ishkanian, who reported Actress Heather Locklear, 47, to 911 after observing her acting strangely and driving erratically while maneuvering her car in a Montecito, California parking lot. Ishkanian told authorities that Locklear, who left a treatment facility in July after receiving four weeks of treatment for "anxiety and depression,"stopped shortly after exiting the parking lot, stepped out of her car and stumbled into a traffic lane. A California Highway Patrol officer found her shortly after inside her vehicle stopped in a travel lane nearby and booked her on suspicion of driving under the influence of a controlled substance. Wow, a paparazzi doing the right thing"not just reporting the alcoholic antics of her subject, but actually ...
Permalink
October 8, 2008 at 5:17 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
Thomas "Bud"McDonald, who appeared as the freckled and big eared Buddy in several "Our Gang"movies in the 1930s and later co-founded what are now called the Southern California Alcohol and Drug Programs, dead from congestive heart failure at age 85. McDonald began his movie career at age 8 but moved to Oregon with his mother and two brothers after his parents divorced during his mid-teen years. He eventually moved back to Southern California and became a Los Angeles police officer. After four years on the force, he "left"the LAPD in part, according to his son, because of alcoholism and "running with a bad crowd."His alcoholism-induced misbehaviors obviously worsened, as he was quickly convicted of armed robbery. ...
Permalink
« Previous Page —
« Previous entries« Previous Page ·
Next Page »Next entries » —
Next Page »
