Dr. Drew’s resting pious face and the way he portrays what appears to be soul crushing empathy while listening to Natalie Holloway gossip has been growing tired for some time now. You get the feeling he routinely breaks down in tears on his drive home about the fate of Amanda Bynes. I’m not sure how much of this is feigned versus authentic but I’d guess like most things the answer is somewhere in the middle.
Drew’s stance on drug use is an aggressive policy of abstinence. Once on Loveline he was asked how he would respond if his high school aged son came home drunk one night and he said he would immediately put him into a counseling and treatment program. After one time. That ranks him somewhere between a helicopter parent and a neurotic reactionary lunatic.
His totalitarian beliefs on the subject aren’t surprising. He is a psychiatrist who works with drug addicts so he has experience with the worst cases. Also, rehab is his industry, and it’s highly profitable.
Drew knows this himself, as he was once paid $275,000 over the span of just two months by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKlyne to promote the anti-depressant Wellbutrin during a string of speaking engagements. Glaxo was working on a campaign push for Wellbutrin as a superior alternative to other anti-depressants because they claimed without proof that users did not suffer decreased sex drive with their product – a common occurrence. Unfortunately the FDA had not authorized them to make this claim. In order to get around that they simply bought off some doctors, such as Drew, who agreed to promote their product under the auspices of his own “Clinical trials” supporting exactly what they told him to say.
Doctors do this all the time. Pharmaceutical reps, most of them attractive young women, take them out to dinners, provide them with vacations and envelopes of money, and in return they advertise the drug to their patients or in Drew’s case the general public. He has most likely received much more money from drug companies for hawking their products. He mentions drugs by name on Loveline on a regular basis.
Doctors are not necessarily required to disclose their compensation for speaking engagements and when you’re a TV personality playing a doctor who is actually a doctor it gets even more murky. The only reason Glaxo’s contributions to him are public knowledge is that the Department of Justice successfully prosecuted them for their covert advertising methods of using shills like Drew to get their message out. They were fined $3 billion. Drew didn’t break any laws.
It’s obvious he isn’t an unbiased source when it comes to drug use. He’s not being paid by the cartels, he’s being paid by Glaxo, Pfizer and others, and not coincidentally he often advocates for replacing street drugs with pharmaceutical drugs and drinking alcohol with a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. Name brand of course.
Some people smoke pot to relax. Maybe you like to rack a couple of lines before you go out dancing. Whatever the case, Drew has an alternative. And it’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
He recently came out and admitted he was a coke head in the 1980’s after a report in the Daily Mail quoted many coworkers and acquaintances as confirming this. Drew had denied ever using drugs on many occasions, because he depends on his image as a squeaky clean moral arbiter for the mainstream media to allow him to do his stupid TV show because if they had someone who was honest about drugs they’d lose all the ad money provided by the drug companies, which is enormous.
A quick survey of history shows people like Drew to be full of shit one hundred percent of the time. Here’s what he said on Howard Stern in 2009:
Stern: Were you ever a user of drugs?
Drew: No.
Stern: Never? Never tried pot? Nothing?
Drew: Thank god it’s not in me. It doesn’t seem like anyway. I’m thinking – not good.
Robin Quivers: Do you feel you can’t really relate because you don’t have any experience?
Drew: No. I can. In fact people in recovery always tell me that it is weird how much I understand it. They don’t understand how a non-recovery person has such a deep appreciation of this condition. I don’t know. It’s like the right side of my brain is overdeveloped and I can just tune into that.
Oh I see, your brain is overdeveloped. You’re just really smart. It’s not like you used to sit around doing blow with teenage girls in your radio studio and that you actually said the phrase “I really love cocaine!” like how a total coke fiend would do.
Apart from being hyper intelligent Drew identified his other fatal flaw which is that he isn’t perfect, as he had assumed was the general consensus. He didn’t apologize for lying and misrepresenting himself but offered the following on his HLN show directly after the Daily Mail article came out:
“This whole perfectionism thing… I talking on the radio today about this very thing, and I get accused of being perfect all the time and that is, no, I am not a perfect person, especially when I was younger, I was a screwball like everybody else.”
How do you get accused of being perfect? “Hey, fuck you, you’re amazing.” I think more appropriately you get accused of pretending to be perfect, which is a entirely different.
The hypocrisy is stunning. I don’t see how pushing pharmaceutical drugs and lying about your own, from what I understand, not entirely negative to possibly positive experience is any different than one of these Republican politicians preaching anti-gay rhetoric and then going on Grindr to find a teenage fuck buddy.
Drew doesn’t support prison sentences for drug offenses, but his blind demonization of any drug without a label certainly in some way contributes to the climate we find ourselves in, in which street drugs are seen as inherently dangerous and prescription drugs inherently harmless. Drew is propagating a belief system which has led to our current drug laws, by which the US incarcerates far more people than any country in the world, and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t want it any other way.
That’s their competition.
Lying about your own experience while attempting to act as a savior for the less strong of will is not only dangerous, it’s supremely arrogant. It assumes you could handle drugs. Not the weak. You and your overdeveloped brain could breeze through years of regular cocaine use yet if the neighbor kid down the street comes home beaked out of his mind it’s time to put him into a facility.
It diminishes the cause for people who actually should be seeking out sobriety because you’re hurting your industry’s credibility. Let alone the financial conflict of interest, it proves that people who advocate a hardline stance on sobriety are often hypocrites projecting a holier than thou image to the masses they see themselves as the saviors of and blowing lines in the bathroom before taking the stage at the pharma convention. And then there’s Rush Limbaugh.
Put down the cocaine and take these pills. Who do we bill? How about the government? No more small business. No more drug dealers. Put your corporate shills on the airways and instigate a draconian stance of zero tolerance. If it’s not publicly traded it’s trashy. Watch the stupid lawmen bite. Welcome to the new world order.
What does it say for his credibility that Drew himself never went to rehab?
I know some guys. Meet me at The Roosevelt and we’ll party. Maybe we can wipe that sour expression off your puss. We’re not giving up on you yet.