Changing the definition of addiction

[Guest guest]

January 2006

 

Rite of Passage

 

A luxury substance abuse center is changing the definition of addiction

by Rachel Dowd

 

John B. stood on his balcony with a German Luger pointed at his head.

He’d just shot the pistol twice to be sure it would fire, alarming his

13-year old daughter inside. John had been her age when he first started

drinking and now, 30 years later, he was giving up. He closed his eyes

and pulled the trigger.

 

The gun broke into three pieces. Maybe the warning shots wiggled

something loose; maybe it was fate. Either way, John took it as a sign

to redouble his efforts: more AA meetings and more therapy.

 

Months later, John left a morning AA meeting and bought his usual pint

of 90 proof Schnapps, finishing it easily in a few swigs. He’d picked a

fight with his wife to avoid going to a party at their friend’s house,

and was now free to lose himself in an afternoon of stiff drinks and

cocaine. As John drove down Pacific Coast Highway, he noticed Passages,

a recently opened rehabilitation center in Malibu, and without thinking,

turned up the drive. The gate wouldn’t open, so he rammed his BMW Z3

convertible into it. When it still didn’t budge, he scaled the fence.

 

Bare-chested and shoeless, with nothing more than the sweatsuit and

Ray-Ban sunglasses he wore, John checked himself in for a 30-day stay at

the most expensive substance abuse facility in the country.

 

Luxury rehab is nothing new, and in Malibu, it’s almost de rigueur.

Upscale Malibu rehab facilities like Harmony Place, Renaissance Malibu,

Promises and Passages all adhere to the notion that beautiful

surroundings and world-class cooking provide rejuvenation to a dependent

soul. And it’s hard to argue with them. Sitting at Passages’ sun-soaked

kitchen table with a cup of Earl Grey and a Sunday New York Times,

watching the sea stretch endlessly beyond rose bushes and rock gardens,

one might be convinced it’s essential.

 

“People ask if they can come here without a drug or alcohol problem,”

says co-founder and executive director Chris Prentiss. They can’t, of

course. But it’s easy to understand why they’d want to.

 

Passages stands out in the crowd of beauty contestant rehabs most

prominently for two things: price and bravado. The integrated holistic

program maintains that it can help cure your dependency on drugs and

alcohol in 30 days (though some clients may require more) for roughly

$57,000 per month. It’s a monster of a claim that Passages says has an

84 percent success rate, based on continuous sobriety reported by

alumni. The price tag is staggering, especially considering insurance

usually only reimburses 30 to 50 percent of the cost.

 

“It’s not the world’s affluent who come here,” corrects Prentiss. “It’s

Middle America. People mortgage their houses, max out their credit

cards, sell assets, whatever it takes.”

 

Here’s why: At Passages, drugs and alcohol are not considered the

problem. They are simply the tools one uses to cope with an underlying

issue, whether that’s a chemical imbalance, unresolved trauma from the

past, a belief system out of whack with what’s true, or an inability to

cope with your current state of affairs. So, the task of eight

conventional and alternative doctors and therapists assigned to each

client is to uncover and treat the true cause of that client’s

dependency. When they do, says Passages, the need for chemical

substances consequently and effortlessly disappears, and “easy sobriety”

is yours. Because there’s no test of will involved, they assure, there’s

no threat of relapse.

 

Seven hours a day, each client meets one-on-one with his or her team of

therapists. Teams include Western medical doctors, psychotherapists, TCM

practitioners, acupuncturists, hypnotherapists, masseuses and family and

spiritual counselors who collectively devise and revise an individual

course of weekly treatment.

 

“We gang up on the person,” says medical director Jason Giles, M.D., an

anesthesiologist and specialist in pain management, who overcame his own

addiction to drugs and alcohol years ago. “We push them to an amazing

place and do it all again the next day. We never know who will put in

the last number of the combination.”

 

For Lawrence, a 43-year-old strip club owner from the East Coast who

spent 30 days at Passages in 2004, it was spiritual counselor Audrey Hope.

 

“I really didn’t believe in God,” he says. “But she made me believe just

in the goodness in the world.” Lawrence also hails Pei Ju Lui, one of

three TCM specialists on staff, for helping him detox from Vicodin,

cocaine and steroids. “I’ve never experienced anything like that in my

life. She would sleep at Passages when I was really bad to keep an eye

on me.”

 

What’s notably missing from Passages is the 12-Step program. Prentiss

considers the most widely employed abstinence system in the world (AA

alone is practiced in 150 countries) a “detriment” and the reason

Alcoholics Anonymous fails. But he isn’t just being contentious;

Prentiss has seen the fallout of the 12-Step Program firsthand.

 

Chris Prentiss’s son, Pax Prentiss, 31, spent the lion’s share of a

decade in and out of treatment centers for a heroin, cocaine and alcohol

addiction he began as a teenager in Venice and continued through college

and beyond. His father tried everything he could think of to keep his

boy sober, but nothing stuck. Even nine months of sobriety in a cabin at

Big Sur held up only a week when Pax returned home.

 

“I took him to 30-, 60-, 90-day programs, psychiatrists and drug and

alcohol specialists. They all sang the same song: Alcohol and drug

addiction is an incurable disease,” says Prentiss. “Don’t reward him,

punish him, keep him away from people who are using drugs, and send him

to a 12-Step program. None of that worked.”

 

What ultimately did work was a rudimentary version of Passages’ program.

Papa Prentiss corralled an assortment of healers to test Pax’s blood,

saliva and urine for chemical imbalances and to give acupuncture,

massage, reflexology and psychotherapy. And he continued to ask Pax the

same question he’d been asking for years—Why?

 

“Finding out why you’re self-destructing is crucial,” says Pax, who

co-founded Passages with Chris in 2001 after realizing that his

dependency centered on feelings of inadequacy and competition with his

father. “There’s always a reason. And as long as something is bothering

you, you’ll seek relief. Once you know, it’s like pulling a weed out at

the root. There’s no reason to use.”

 

Prentiss alleges that Passages has no critics. None that will explicitly

go on the record, perhaps, but there are skeptics.

 

“Be very suspicious of any place that says they have an 84 percent

success rate, or ‘cure’ rate, even worse,” says Russ Patrick, spokesman

for the Betty Ford Clinic. “They’re such squishy figures. An unfortunate

aspect of the disease is the susceptibility to relapse. Someone may

relapse and ‘fail’ in the short term, but come right back [to sobriety],

which is a ‘success.’ How do you account for that?”

 

Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t publicize success rates; however, an

internal study by AA Intergroup in 1988 put first-time sobriety rates at

5 percent. But AA doesn’t claim to be the only way or even the best

path, just one that has worked for some over the last 70 years.

According to a staff member from the general service office in NY, who

prefers to maintain anonymity: “It’s a solution that has worked, but

we’re happy to share [with other solutions].”

 

For the 700 Passages alumni like John B., the method to the madness

hardly matters.

 

“I’m still not sure how it works,” he says. “But it put me on a

spiritual growth journey and allowed me to be a human being again. It’s

worth every penny if you’re able to grasp it.”

 

“What’s 50 grand?” asks Lawrence. “It’s nothing compared to what an

addict spends on drugs.”

 

Maybe not, but it is a hell of a lot of money. Passages says that it

costs $150,000 a month to keep the 16-bedroom, 14-bath, 16,500 square

foot facility, not including salaries for the 21 therapists and 56 staff

members. And with enrollment topping out at 24, it gets tricky to make

it all add up. The truth is, for the 16 percent of people who aren’t

“cured,” all that money went for naught. But a growing number of people

consider those odds worth cashing in their 401K’s. Or, maybe the free AA

route just isn’t an option.

 

“I didn’t see AA as something that would work for me,” says Kristen, 27,

who spent just over two months at Passages for a five-year addiction

that had progressed from Vicodin to methadone. “After leaving Passages,

I went into a sober living house that was pro-AA. There were so many

rules, even about getting into a relationship. It becomes your life, and

I didn’t want that to be my everyday existence.” One year later, Kristen

doesn’t go to meetings or even counseling; she’s married with a

4-month-old baby girl.

 

For those without the resources or the inclination to 12-step, Prentiss

wrote The Alcoholism & Addiction Cure to teach readers how to create a

Passages program using their own community’s doctors and alternative

practitioners, including resources for tracking them down. The best part

of going it alone? Do the math.

 

Rachel Dowd is the assistant editor at Variety’s V Life Weekend.

 

 

© 2005 WHOLE LIFE TIMES