Several years ago, the Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis was making a movie on location when he discovered that one of his principal cast members had a serious drinking problem. 

The actor failed to show up for a night scene he was to appear in. After a costly delay, it was discovered that a local bartender, having watched the actor drink himself into insensibility, had driven him back to his motel. 

As Zemeckis remembered it during an interview in his office on the Universal Studios backlot, his immediate reaction was swift and terrible: at 2 a.m. he phoned the local doctor who was on call for the film company, summoned him to the set and proceeded to berate him, loudly blaming him and him alone for the actor's inebriated state.

"Irrational? Of course," Zemeckis said. "I would hope that I wouldn't react the same way again. But it was simply the unbelievable frustration of not being in control of this problem." 

He shook his head ruefully. His story, he admitted, is a "perfect parable" for society's chronically wrongheaded approach to the complicated problem of addiction.

"One thing that quickly becomes apparent," he said, "is that there is no solution to the problem. You can't control what is basically a personal journey. You can't legislate sobriety." 

> Zemeckis.. has made a two-hour documentary on this very subject [for Showtime] titled "The Pursuit of Happiness: Smoking, Drinking and Drugging in the 20th Century."

..
..

Something will happen to end it all [my life], but until that occurs, as flawed, ungrateful and self-centered as I can be from time to time, and as full of tears and obsessions as I am, the one thing I'm most proud of is that I am no longer ruled by alcohol. ... 

I have been sober for almost eight years and my life is a billion percent better. Now I don't have the craving for alcohol, I have the craving for clarity and life.

..
..

I'm still a lunatic, but I'm a recovering lunatic. My life is crazier, yet happier and more productive than ever before. Sh*t happens all the time but what a pleasure that I don't create most of it anymore. What a pleasure it is to just try to do the right thing and see what happens. 

What a joy to feel free of the prison of alcohol abuse! ... It's so much easier now to let the universe take care of itself without thinking like I used to, that I had something to do with it. 

Richard Lewis - from his book The Other Great Depression: How I'm Overcoming, on a Daily Basis, at Least a Million Addictions and Dysfunctions and Finding a Spiritual (Sometimes) Life

Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. 

Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a "paranoid meglomaniac" and "untreated alcoholic" whose "lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad" showcase Bush's instabilities.

"I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed," Dr. Frank said.

..
..

She showed me how to tilt the gin bottle into the tumbler with the ice, strain the iced liquid into the long-stemmed martini glass, and add the vermouth. 

"Just pass the bottle over the gin," she explained in the genteel Yankee voice that had made her gift shop such a success that she was able to support her sons and husband. 

I watched enthralled as she twisted the lemon peel with her tiny white hands and its oil spread across the shimmery surface. 

I was six. 

Susan Cheever - 

in her memoir Note Found in a Bottle

Fifty percent of all traffic fatalities are alcohol-related, and guess who's in that? Your kid, right? Twenty-five percent of all hospital admissions are alcohol-related, so guess how much that costs? 

And then domestic violence. Somehow an entire nation is looking the other way. ...

There are ads for drinking all over the place. I'm much more worried about the ads for liquor on television than I am about the violence on television. 

I mean, my kids are being told that beer is cool, and kids in school are doing projects aping the ads for that cool vodka. What are they doing? ///

When you look at what we've done to people who smoke, and I'm not saying smoking is o.k., but drinking until you're drunk is also not o.k. and you never hear about it. 

People don't drive cars off the road and kill whole families because they're smoking. I'm just saying we shouldn't be blind to it -- it makes me crazy. 

..
..
Charles Bukowski..(1920-1994)

His father would preach the values of the American Dream: Be industrious, make money, buy a house, have a family. 

But while his father was proselytizing, he was also meting out brutal beatings to the sensitive young boy several times a week, from age 6 through his teens. ///

Out of this early experience came much suffering but also self-reliance, individuality and an incredible strength.

..
..

...from The Last Night of the Earth Poems

> image above by Robert Crumb from The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship - by Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb

Drug and alcohol abuse are not the only self-destructive or compulsively-driven behaviors that artists typically manifest. Sexual promiscuity is another. 

Self-sabotaging behaviors in the workplace -- oversleeping for an interview with an agent after having spent a year wooing the agent, acting compulsively rude at a party of wealthy patrons - are also extremely common.

In eighth grade you're completely hormonally challenged up the ying-yang and on top of all these feelings they make you go to dances. 

I had walked to the dance like Richard Nixon, you know, like this. And stood around, and it's surprising that no one asked me to dance, and then I had like a beer and a half.

And boys asked me to dance and I was home free. I think things started to work for me a little bit better when I started to take drugs and to drink alcoholically.

And I started to drink pretty regularly by the time I was 13. I got very drunk on a nightly basis from the time I was about 19 'til 32.

..
..

I stopped because I was just well enough to realize I was probably going to die of it. 

I called a sober alcoholic named Jack who's been a really great family friend and I said, "I quit," and he said, "Great, let's talk."

Heavy social drinkers show the same pattern of brain damage as hospitalized alcoholics -- enough to impair day-to-day functioning, U.S. researchers said. Brain scans show clear damage, and tests of reading, balance and other function show people who drink more than 100 drinks a month have some problems, the researchers said.

"Socially functioning heavy drinkers often do not recognize that their level of drinking constitutes a problem that warrants treatment," the researchers, at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the University of California San Francisco, wrote in their report.

> from cnn.com / Reuters article April 15, 2004  /  
> photo : Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon in Sex and the City [DVD]