Somewhere on an Emotional Desert Highway

Kym was frequently high on Percocet at age 16. Her mother knew this, but still left Kym in charge of her four year-old brother Ethan.

Driving home from a park, Kym lost control of the car and it plunged off a bridge and into a lake. She was not able to get Ethan out of his car seat in time, and he drowned.

Years later, Kym is still struggling with addiction. And with God too, like Job before her.

And then there is the utterly broken relationship with her mother. On the eve of her sister’s wedding, Kym finally confronts her with the loaded questions: “Why did you leave me in charge of him? What were you thinking?”

Rachel Getting Married raises many deep issues. To his credit, director Jonathan Demme has the good sense to leave many of them unresolved. The film is fiction, not a documentary. But it points to the raw emotion involved in human conflict, regardless of whether that conflict is addressed by the criminal law.

The fragmented family Demme depicts could have used a restorative healing circle. That was not to be, though the groom's touching rendition of a Neil Young song at Kym's sister's wedding provides a measure of musical therapy.

Derek Boogard: Split Personality?

In Newjack, his account of working as a guard at New York's Sing Sing prison, Ted Conover writes of the travails of corrrectional officer work.

Being "society's proxies," is a difficult job. Conover recounts a story of the ice-breaking joke told by a trainer to the cadets seeking to become COs in the New York State system in the 1990s.

"What's the first three things you get when you become a CO?" the trainer asks. The punchline was: "An car. A gun. A divorce."

Gallows humor, to be sure. The (relative) financial security represented by the car comes from excersing power (the gun) in a soul-sapping system of incarceration. The relentless cops-and-robbers role-playing takes a toll not only on the officer, but on his or her family. Hence the inclusion of divorce in the bitter joke.

I was reminded of this Conover material when reading press accounts over the weekend of the death of Derek Boogard, the former on-ice enforcer for the Minnesota Wild hockey team. According to the Star Trib, the guy was a sweetheart off the ice.

On the ice, however, he took on the role of tough guy. Boogard scored only three goals in his six-year career. But he carved out a niche for himself as a fighter in a fast, violent sport - a niche that his skating and puck handling skills alone would not have merited.

Boogard was found dead in his Minneapolis apartment at the age of 28. Though his history of history of concussions may have been a factor in his untimely death, the press also reported that he had entered the NHL's substance abuse program.

What follows is purely speculation on my part. But could it be that Boogard had trouble squaring his on-ice fighter role with the good guy he sought to be in every other realm? If so, Boogard's problems with substance addiction may have reflected a split personality in need of integration.

C. Cuomo Plays 'Gotcha" at a Pill Mill

Nightline reported tonight on “pill mills,” in which unscrupulous clinics allow unsupervised staff to sell mass quantities of heavy-duty painkillers and other prescription drugs to anyone who can pay and is willing to fake a semi-plausible story of medical need.

The director of the Texas Medical Board calls this crime, not medicine. And the dubious outlets have lead to numerous deaths by overdose in the last three years.

Nightline reporter Chris Cuomo, the brother of New York’s new governor, went to one such clinic to confront the operators with their nefarious ways. In a classic investigative journalism gesture, Cuomo knocked on the clinic door, ready to pounce. The trope is, I believe, called “gotcha.”



The respondent who opened the door initially responded that anyone who did what Cuomo alleged should go to prison, should to jail. (The terms were used interchangeably, as they so often are in American parlance.)

Then he closed the door, leaving Cuomo to spin the story.

Thrown Another Curve By His Own Demons

Dwight Gooden, once a marvelously talented pitcher, has struggled for years with drug addiction. In the last few years, however, he seemed to have gotten his life on track. After working as an executive for the Newark Bears, a minor league team, he was hoping to land a job as a coach for the New York Mets, the team with which he rose to stardom in the mid-1980s. The Mets had invited him to spring training as an adviser.

Then the former pitcher threw it all away - again. With his five-year-old son in the car, he rear-ended another vehicle and was arrested. New Jersey authorities charged him with driving under the influence of drugs, child endangerment, DWI with a child passenger, and leaving the scene of an accident.

Gooden, 45, has tried drug rehab at least five times, has a half-dozen previous arrests, and served seven months in jail in Florida in 2006. Now comes this incident, in which he put his own son at risk. New Jersey police are not saying which drug they suspect Gooden of using, but he has a history of cocaine abuse.

How will this play out, I wonder, as the years unfold, in Gooden's relationship with his son?

One Way To Break An Addiction

After smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for nearly forty years, my mother-in-law quit cold turkey, after only one session of hypnosis.

Hypnosis!

She began smoking in the early 1950s and kept right on going, undeterred by the 1964 Surgeon General report. The possibility of serious consequences from a behavior counts for little, if anything, when the continuation of the behavior is due to an addiction.

(In the criminal justice context, this is why harsh penalties, particularly for drug crimes, so often have so little effect. When addiction gets in the way, deterence is a non-starter.)

By 1991, Wynne knew it was time for a change. A work colleague gave her a referral to a hypnotist, who was able to help cure her nicotine addiction in one fell swoop.

Amazing!

Addictions are not usually broken in single, scales-from-the-eyes sessions. But, thankfully, this one was. Wynne is still with us, at age 76, doing the crossword every day, patronizing the public library, singing in her church choir − and much else besides.

She surely wouldn’t be doing these things if hypnosis hadn’t enabled her to stop smoking.

Addicted to War's Adrenaline Rush?

"War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," went the title of a book by the journalist Chris Hedges a few years ago. It was a cautionary tale by a veteran war correspondent about the addictive quality of war.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Zone dramatizes this addiction to utterly harrowing effect.



Words fail; go see it.