Dr. Drew Pinsky Author, TV Personality, Trusted Health and Wellness Advocate

Dr. Drew Pinsky
Author, TV Personality, Trusted Health and Wellness Advocate

“Cleaning Up with Dr. Drew”
Rolling Stone, January 24, 2008, By David Amsden

On Wednesdays, the doctor gives a lecture. Inside a cramped, brightly lit room on the manicured grounds of Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, California, he holds forth on his favorite subjects: the vicious pull of drug addiction, the fraught road to recovery, the daily challenge of sobriety. He speaks for exactly one hour – the Doctor’s schedule is tight – delivering his thoughts while pacing back and forth, somehow making eye contact with fifty people at once. His stern voice is familiar, though not recognizable – not in this context, anyway, not before an audience of crackheads, junkies, teenage alcoholics, coke fiends, Ecstasy enthusiasts and just about every other kind of hardcore addict you can imagine. A few hours from now, he will be inside a radio studio, relaxed in jeans and a sweatshirt, where he will morph into Dr. Drew, host of the syndicated radio show Loveline, the guy famous for giving adolescents the sort of sex advice they can’t get in health class. (A recent male caller asked if cooking oil is a good lubricant for anal sex, wondering on air if a giant tin of Crisco could support a lifetime of hassle-free sodomy. Dr. Drew advised the caller to stick to more-hygienic, water-based products.)

It can be something of a jolt to discover that behind the Dr. Drew persona there’s an actual working doctor. “Every now and then, people come up to him and are like, ‘So are you a real doctor or just some kind of love doctor?’” says the comedian Adam Carolla, Pinsky’s former Loveline co-host. “In Drew’s mind, he’s an educated and serious professional. But because he’s out there, he gets lumped in with these feel-good, Dr. Phil types.” Loveline has been on the air since 1982, doubling as an MTV show for four years, and as a result, Pinsky is now one of the best-known doctors in America. One morning he is on the Today show, the next afternoon it’s The Tyra Banks Show. Seemingly every week he’s on the twenty-four-hour news channels, hypothesizing on the demons plaguing Britney and Lindsay. Meanwhile, he has found time to play a doctor in movies (Wild Hogs) and on television (Dawson’s Creek). All this, and the guy manages to spend forty hours a week at Las Encinas – where he’s the medical director of chemical dependency – keep up a private practice as a family physician and teach psychiatry at his alma mater, the University of Southern California.

The latest addition to the Dr. Drew resume is the VH1 reality show called Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, on which he treats nine famous people you’ve kinda sorta hear of (e.g., the wrestler Chyna) for drug and alcohol problems. A cynic might be tempted to see Celebrity Rehab as little more than Pinsky’s attempt to capitalize on what could be called a cultural addiction to celebrity addiction – Britney’s shaved head! David Hasselhoff’s hamburger meltdown! – all while enhancing his own celebrity. But the Doctor is an optimist at heart, an earnest believe that even the crassest mediums (talk radio, reality TV) can be subversively manipulated for altruistic means. The forty-nine-year-old has been immersed in the culture of celebrity for some time now – as both observer and participant – and has come to believe not only that fame often results in a bad case of narcissistic personality disorder but that this disease of excessive notoriety has infected us all. Listen to him talk about Celebrity Rehab and you realize he thinks the show has a kind of covert public-service announcement.

“Look, I’m not saying people are going to watch it and have some kind of epiphany,” he says while giving a tour of Las Encinas, which specializes in behavioral health and has the feel of a rundown country club. “I see it more like turning the battleship just a little bit in a better direction. Fine, go out and make fun of Britney Spears if that’s your impulse. But if I can get you to temper that with some understanding of the struggles going on with a person like that, then maybe (a) you can be a better person, (b) you go get help if you need it and (c) knock this bullshit off a little bit.”

This is a hard statement to process, given that Pinsky is talking about a show featuring what may be a rehab clinic’s first wet-T-shirt contest. Yet because he is so likable and well-intentioned, when Pinsky talks, you want to believe him. “I saw the show as a chance to dispel a lot of myths about rehab,” he continues, passing a grim building surrounded by a massive chain-link fence. “See that? That’s for dangerous and suicidal types. Anyway, people think rehab is some kind of vacation, where these people go to get rock therapy and massages. But treatment done properly? It’s a very intense experience. We have to change people’s brainwork, change who they fundamentally are as people.” To illustrate his point, he heads to the hospital’s detox room; inside, a middle-aged woman is lying in a bed, covered in sweat, writhing in pain. “Intense,” the Doctor whispers gravely.

The moment like this is pure Pinsky. He exudes so much irony-free sympathy that at times you can’t help but wonder if he is delusional – someone who has spent so long on Hollywood’s periphery that he no longer sees the difference between the desperate, anonymous patients paying for his services at Las Encinas and the egomaniacs who were paid to be “patients” on Celebrity Rehab. This is a show that’s on VH1, after all, the network that pioneered the “celebreality” genre, in which the quasi-famous are made more famous by playing imbecilic lab rats. “The show is trying to take this moment of celebrity insanity – both the behavior of celebrities and our obsession with them – and try to explain why it’s happening,” says VH1 executive VP of production Michael Hirschorn. “It’s part of the celebreality continuum, but it lives a little outside it. Obviously these are people who thrive on attention, but at the same time, the show is so raw that anyone will see it was far from a joy ride.”

On the hospital tour, Dr. Drew is interrupted by a young man, his arms shellacked in tattoos, his head shaved save for a bleach-blond Mohawk. “Yo, Dr. Pinsky!” he shouts. “What’s up, Seth?” Pinsky replies. Seth turns out to be Seth “Shifty Shellshock” Binzer, lead singer of Crazy Town, the band responsible for the 2001 hit “Butterfly,” and yes, a cast member of Celebrity Rehab. On the show, we see Binzer freebasing cocaine and, later, saying things like “I’ve been blessed with fame, but with the blessing came the curse by the name of cocaine.” Over the course of the show, it doesn’t seem like Binzer ever fundamentally changes as a person. But the Binzer before us at Las Encinas is a different human being: mellow, reflective, working the program. He has come by to talk to Pinsky about a fellow cast member, American Idol’s Jessica Sierra, whose transformation has been less extreme. She is currently in a Florida jail, where she has pleaded not guilty to charges of disorderly intoxication and violating probation on drug and battery charges. (It is later reported that she is pregnant with the child of an unnamed rapper and, against her will, has a sex tape coming out). Binzer is genuinely concerned. He wants to help. “If we can get her out, I found a clinic in Malibu that would be willing to treat her,” he tells Pinsky. “The place is the real deal. Just like you, man.”

Maybe Drew Pinsky is not so delusional.

The doctor lives high in the hills of Pasadena, his sprawling home shrouded by palm trees and protected by an imposing gate. On weeknights he arrives at seven to have dinner with his wife Susan, and their fifteen-year-old triplets. Afterward the kids do their homework; he and Susan watch Deal or No Deal, and then Drew heads off to Culver City, where Loveline tapes five nights a week, live between ten and midnight. Pinsky still finds himself a little mystified at the life this whole Dr. Drew concoction has given him. He grew up only a few miles from here, his mother an opera singer, his father a family practitioner. A self-described “hyperachiever,” in high school, Pinsky was student-body president, an opera singer and captain of the football team. Then came Amherst, followed by USC medical school. Pinsky’s tenure on Loveline began as a clandestine hobby while he pursued a career in medicine. “I called myself Dr. Drew so no one would know it was me,” he says.

Reflecting back, Pinsky describes Loveline as a response to his own struggles as a teenager. Like most overachievers, he had always been anxiety-prone, and it was during his freshman year at Amherst that he suffered a “really significant depression episode.” The pressure of college and the encroaching threat of adulthood left him “paralyzed” by constant panic attacks. “The whole thing was just completely mishandled,” he recalls. “I remember going down to student health services and the doctor getting angry at me. He told me to take more walks, to shake it off. Shake it off! I was like, ‘I’d be glad to, but, you know, I can’t!’” Ultimately this “miserable period” led him to medicine. “I just had this intense sense of meaning and purpose,” he says. “By the time I got to medical school, I was having a blast.”

Loveline quickly gained a cult following throughout LA. Over the years, the show has changed, but the formula has always been the same: trash medium meets trenchant message. Listeners are drawn in by tales of strangers’ sex lives – he put what where? – then surprised to hear Pinsky taking these tales as seriously as a cardiologist would a patient with severe chest pains. One recent night on Loveline, Dr. Drew hears from Crystal, 18, who isn’t sure what to make of her boyfriend dumping her via text message. “I would say it’s over,” counsels Pinsky. Then Kenny, 23, calls in: “So, I was, like having sex with my girl or whatever, and when we finished I noticed the condom broke! Right away I ran my ass to the drugstore and doused my junk in rubbing alcohol!” Pinsky is quiet as his co-host, DJ Stryker, and guest, The Soup host Joel McHale, have a little fun gibing Kennedy. Then Pinsky soberly points out that rubbing alcohol won’t counter an STD, that Kenny is probably OK, but he should keep an eye on his junk for the next week or so. “Thanks, Dr. Drew!” Kenny replies. “I’ve been listening to you since forever! You’re why I always use condoms! I swear, man, I want to nominate you for, like, Jesus!”

Kenny’s call captures what makes Loveline revolutionary: Pinsky is able to deliver earnest advice – use protection, get tested, love your family – in a forum where kids actually listen. Today the show can seem weirdly wholesome, a throwback to a less-exploitative moment in pop culture. But getting to this point took time. “A lot of people accused us of exploiting people,” recalls former co-host Carolla. “People were like, ‘Who’s this guy giving advice to our teenagers?’ Now they wait in line to get him to talk to their teenagers.”

That said, Dr. Drew’s public methodology gets mixed reviews. “Is he doing good in the long run for most people?” asks Thomas F. Newton, a psychiatrist who treats chemical dependency at UCLA. “The answer is yes. He’s helping people, and it’s always good if people can talk about recovery. But is he making the field look silly in the short term? The answer is probably also yes.”

The doctor’s instincts initially told him that Celebrity Rehab was a terrible idea. There were ethical questions to consider. There was his credibility as a doctor. The show was not his idea. (“Hell, no! They came to me.”) To understand what changed his mind, you have to go back to a point in Pinsky’s career: His own fame rising, he decided to study the idea of celebrity itself as a kind of personality disorder. Along with Dr. Mark Young, a colleague of his at USC, Pinsky spent a few years surveying famous people with a respected test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. They interviewed 200 stars – Loveline guests were grilled during commercials – and the result was the first empirical, academic treatise proving that celebrities are in fact substantially more narcissistic than the rest of us.

Of course, this seems an obvious conclusion – until Pinsky gets talking about it, at which point he launches into his theory about the Way We Live Now. “I believe something has shifted,” Pinsky says. “Frankly, something substantial happened when we developed antibiotics and hormonal contraceptives. Before 1950, almost half of American families could expect a child to die. Way more women could expect to die during childbirth. Living past fifty was sort of extraordinary. Now death and dying don’t really exist for us. We don’t need to deal with it. And then with birth control, sexuality became unhinged from a biological reality. Throughout human history, sex carried with it heavy consequences. It could kill you. Suddenly we were unhinged from that, and I think our culture has been rattling ever since. In 500 years, people will say the biological circumstances of human life changed profoundly, and it took them 150 years to figure it out. They’ll say everyone became narcissistic, obsessed with instant pleasure, they stopped taking care of their children, and all hell broke loose.” A meditative pause. “Listen, in the days of Freud, narcissism was a footnote in psychological journals. Now it’s the standard personality of our culture. Nothing but grandiose narcissistic thinking everywhere!”

Pinsky being Pinsky, he then seamlessly connects this monologue to Celebrity Rehab, calling the nine cast members “sicker versions of the rest of us.” Pinsky knows the medium he is describing. “Look, this was not an easy experience,” he says. “They kept pushing for good TV when I just wanted to do good treatment. At one point, they were like, ‘We’ll build a totem pole, and each step in the totem pole will be a step in recovery.’ I kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, crazy things will happen on their own, this process is intense.’”

He won most of his battles with the producers – there is no totem pole – but not all. There is the show’s climactic trip to Catalina, for instance, an island off Los Angeles, an outing that made for “good TV” and not much else. “VH1 goes, ‘We’re tired of the four walls of the building. You’re going to Catalina,’” Pinsky says. “Now, here’s my perspective: You want me to take nine sick, fragile people to Catalina? What? And, of course, some shit goes down. Basically, someone jumped off the boat, and some things happened with the Harbor Patrol and the FBI, and then Homeland Security got involved. I’m like, ‘Help! I’m having panic attack after panic attack.’ The anxiety was awful.” But Pinsky refuses to look at the show negatively. “It all ended up OK,” he says. “Every time something went down, there was an opportunity for growth. Because they wouldn’t leave. They wanted to be on TV.”

The Doctor’s private practice is tucked away along a dreary stretch of gas stations and fast-food joints in South Pasadena – a swath of Los Angeles that’s disconnected from Hollywood. You can find Pinsky here a few days a week, sitting in a windowless room the size of a closet, treating asthmatic kids, widows with bowel problems, ruddy-faced men with coronary disease. Over the years, Pinsky has had to scale back the practice to accommodate his mushrooming career as Dr. Drew. Keeping it going means losing money, though Pinsky has no plans to close up shop. “I can’t be one of those people who says they’re a doctor but hasn’t practiced medicine in twenty years,” he says. “If I shrunk it down, my skills would suffer. I take immense value personally in doing this work. It’s who I am. I have patients that I’m committed to – that I’ve promised to be with forever.”

But this is not the only reason. Pinsky recognizes the irony inherent in the Dr. Drew enterprise: that is requires a massive ego to position yourself as the popular combatant of narcissism. “I’m treating something I’m a symptom of, right?” Pinsky says. “Yeah, I see that. The way I define myself, I have to have narcissistic issues to be participating in all this. But I’ve had enough treatment to understand it. For years, I was in therapy. I’m talking about years. I don’t think what I do is an explicit acting-out behavior. Whatever narcissistic residue I have, it’s just that – a residue, not a primary thing.” He takes a moment to look around his modest office. “Something like this, most importantly, it keeps you grounded. People need a simple life. I have seen the consequences of people not doing that, and I am not about to be one of them.”