TV treats drugs casually
In a heavily promoted live episode of “Will & Grace” last month, the title characters opened a linen closet in the palatial bathroom belonging to their wealthy friend Karen Walker. Out gushed hundreds and hundreds of pill bottles, a river of amber-colored plastic.
The studio audience went wild. Karen’s fondness for booze and prescription painkillers such as Vicodin is one of the show’s most reliable running jokes, a laugh-getter as surefire as Kramer’s entrances or Frasier Crane’s pomposity.
Dr. David Crausman thinks Karen’s drug use is about as funny as food poisoning – which is what he says her withdrawal symptoms would resemble if they were ever shown forthrightly.
“It’s not a joke at all,” says Crausman, director of the Center for Healthful Living, an outpatient counseling facility in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Their use on TV is so casual at times, he says, it’s as if Vicodin and other prescription painkillers were “glorified aspirin.”
There are notable exceptions. CBS’s crime series “Without a Trace,” for instance, has been working its way through a subplot in which FBI agent Martin Fitzgerald (Eric Close) is wrestling with addiction to painkillers prescribed by a doctor after Fitzgerald was shot in the line of duty.
A recent episode depicted him anxiously rummaging through office trash in search of a pill bottle that earlier, in a stronger moment, he had thrown away.
In Fox’s “House,” the addiction to painkillers of the title character (played by Hugh Laurie), a brilliant medical diagnostician with a bum leg, is, as executive producer David Shore puts it, “a thread we pull on occasionally.”
Shore says he and his staff feel an obligation to depict Dr. House’s drug problem honestly.
“It’s not a show about addiction, but you can’t throw something like this into the mix and not expect it to be noticed and commented on,” he says.
“There have been references to the amount of his consumption increasing over time. It’s becoming less and less useful a tool for dealing with his pain, and it’s something we’re going to continue to deal with, continue to explore.”
More commonplace, however, are such shows as ABC’s new sitcom “Crumbs,” in which Jane Curtin’s character’s recent stint in a mental institution and the medication that makes her release possible are played mostly for laughs; and NBC’s recently canceled “The Book of Daniel,” in which a pill-popping minister (Aidan Quinn) headed an ensemble of calculatedly outrageous characters.
“They’re downplaying the danger,” says Dr. Clifford Bernstein, director of the Waismann Institute, a detox center in San Diego.
“It fosters the attitude, ‘How bad can these things be?’ And that’s one reason why so many people have gotten hooked on them.”
How many is “so many”? According to a report by Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, the number of Americans who abuse controlled prescription drugs has nearly doubled – from 7.8 million to 15.1 million – since 1992. Abuse of such medications among teens has more than tripled over the period.
A study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse released in December said 9.5 percent of 12th-graders reported using the painkiller Vicodin, and 5.5 percent reported using OxyContin.
Doctors acknowledge that the medications have tremendous benefits as well as frightening downsides, that most people who use them don’t become addicted, and that even those who do may not exhibit behaviors that we associate with heroin addicts and crackheads – at least not for a while.
Bernstein notes, for instance, that the portrayal of Karen on “Will & Grace” isn’t necessarily unrealistic.
“Karen is popping Vicodin all the time, and she hasn’t lost her wit,” he says. “She hasn’t lost her edge.
“And that’s the point. You’re too functional on it. It’s almost too good of a drug.”