In Touch With Teens Dr. Drew Has Built A Career Out Of Helping Young People With Very Personal Problems

He’s the E.F. Hutton of the lovelorn, the misguided and the chronically confused.

When Dr. Drew Pinsky talks — about sex or drugs or relationships — young people listen.

And more than just listen, they talk. About masturbation. About sexual abuse. About warts and rashes and Ecstasy and pot.

Seventeen years after he first hosted a late-night sex-advice radio show, Dr. Drew has become a certifiable brand name.

He still hosts the nightly radio show, “Loveline,” with smart-aleck co-host Adam Carolla. A few years ago, the two brought the call-in program to MTV. And early this year, Pinsky launched drdrew.com, a love, sex and health advice Web site geared to Generation Y.

But even Pinsky isn’t sure how he — a 40-year-old father of triplets — became the Pied Piper of the post-puberty set.

“I sort of connect with their pain. I feel bad for them,” Pinsky said Friday, shortly before speaking to several hundred students at Gonzaga University.

Fans call him smart, nonjudgmental, a good listener.

“It’s his honesty,” said Gonzaga senior Amber Gray, who organized Dr. Drew’s campus visit. “It’s his compassion.”

There’s that, and then there’s the fact that Pinsky could charm the stripe off a skunk.

Gonzaga women whistled when the former high school football captain took off his suitcoat during his speech. The men invited him to a neighborhood bar after his talk.

“He’s good-looking,” sophomore Michelle Milkowski said. “He’s very smart.”

“He’s a cool guy,” added freshman Tom Briggs.

Pinsky said he’s forever amazed by the personal things young people tell him and the questions they ask.

And that was no different at Gonzaga, made all the more remarkable that it was Gonzaga. Just a few weeks ago, the Jesuit university scrapped a visit from a Planned Parenthood representative because the organization performs abortions.

But neither the school’s conservative bent nor the presence of a Catholic priest in the front row stopped students from baring their souls to Dr. Drew.

One asked whether he was addicted to masturbation. A young woman confessed that she lived to serve her boyfriend and wondered if she was also a sex addict.

The woman left before Pinsky finished his talk. But afterward he asked a small group of students if they knew who the woman was and if they could get her help through the school’s mental health services.

“Nothing fazes him,” said Curtis Giesen, Pinsky’s childhood friend, fellow Amherst College alumnus and now chief executive officers of drdrew.com. “He has a very unique bedside manner.”

Drdrew.com secured $7.5 million in venture capital from some of the Web’s deepest pockets during its first round of funding. And while other health sites (like drkoop.com), and dot-coms in general, took nose dives during the recent stock market plummet, Giesen and Pinsky are confident drdrew.com will be different.

“We are nothing like those sites,” Pinsky said. “For the last year we’ve been saying those sites are not worthwhile.

“Who uses the Web? Generation Y is using the Web, and they desperately need health information.”

But not everybody’s ready to join the Dr. Drew Fan Club. A writer for the conservative Focus on the Family organization said Pinsky and Carolla “validate sex outside of marriage” and “often tacitly endorse perverse sexual behavior.”

Michael Bailey, who researches and teaches classes on human sexuality at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., calls Pinsky “arrogant in a dangerous way.”

“He wants to attribute all sexual problems to sexual abuse,” Bailey said. “His most common shtick is directly contrary to my reading of the evidence.”

But Pinsky said he’s simply become expert at finding the skeletons in callers’ closets after so many years in the business.

“We can tell immediately what’s going on with people,” Pinsky said.

If Dr. Drew were to call into his own show, his biggest problem likely would be time - the lack of it.

On top of his TV program, radio show and Web site, Pinsky runs a private medical practice in Southern California and is medical director for the chemical dependency department at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, Calif.

In his spare time (what there is of it), Pinsky sings opera. He has a penchant for Verdi’s roles for baritones.

He carves out his mornings for his medical practice, finds time to stop by the drdrew.com offices, tapes a syndicated radio show and TV show, regularly travels the college speaker circuit, and makes time for his wife and 7-year-olds - two boys and a girl.

“What I sacrifice is sleep,” Pinsky said.