Bill Maher
discusses Addiction Is a Choice
by Jeffrey
A. Schaler, Ph.D., on ABC’s “Politically Incorrect”
From
Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher
Transcript
of show broadcast on March 13, 2000
http://abc.go.com/pi/forum/word_index.html
March 13, 2000 [Image]
Guests on this program were:
Helen Gurley Brown
Kim Coles
Drew Pinsky
Scott Weiland
Bill's Opening
Bill: Hi, I'm Bill Maher.
Tomorrow, as you probably know, presidential
primaries will be held in six Southern
states.
It's a day when, through the miracle of
democracy, representatives of our great
parties
gather in their basements to choose the white
guy with the meanest TV commercials --
[ Laughter ]
-- And give him the keys to our nuclear
weapons.
[ Laughter and applause ]
And -- and tomorrow, we will be all over that
here at "PI."
But that's tomorrow.
As for tonight, I would like to dedicate the
next 30 minutes to sex, drugs and rock 'n'
roll
--
[ Cheers and applause ]
Three great American institutions, all ruined
by David Crosby.
[ Laughter ]
Now, my guests tonight are a comedienne, a
Stone Temple Pilot, MTV's resident sex doctor
and the woman who founded
"Cosmopolitan"
magazine.
So don't go away.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the star of
"Politically Incorrect" --
Bill Maher!
[ Applause ]
Panel Discussion
Bill: All right, let's meet our panel.
He's the co-author of "The Drew and Adam
book,"
the co-host of "Loveline" and the
man behind
drdrew.com.
Dr. Drew Pinsky.
Doctor!
[ Cheers and applause ]
Doctor.
How are you, doc?
Drew: good to see you.
Bill: Good to see you, thank you.
She's an actress, also a playwright and
stand-up comedienne, who will be performing
throughout the country this year, Kim Coles,
ladies and gentlemen.
Kim: Hey!
Bill: Hey, you.
Kim: Hello, bill.
How are you?
Bill: How are you?
You look great.
Thank you.
She is the legendary editor-in-chief of
"Cosmopolitan"
international magazine.
Her new book is "I'm Wild Again:
Snippets From
My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts,"
Helen
Gurley Brown, ladies and gentlemen.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Hey, you.
How are you?
Helen: Fine, thank you.
Bill: Thank you for doing this.
The band is the Grammy Award-winning Stone
Temple Pilots.
The CD is "Number four."
And he is Scott Weiland, ladies and
gentlemen.
[ Cheers and applause ]
How you doing?
Scott: Good, how you doing?
Bill: Good to see you.
Thanks for being here.
Okay.
As advertised, this is a show about sex,
drugs
and rock 'n' roll.
Helen, let's start with the sex.
[ Laughter ]
Helen: I thought you'd never ask.
. . .
Bill: All right.
Let's move on to drugs in our triad here.
There is a new book out called
"Addiction Is A
Choice."
It's by George W. Bush.
No, I'm kidding.
[ Laughter ]
Scott: I think that was Nancy Reagan.
[ Applause ]
Bill: That's ridiculous.
Bush certainly couldn't write a book.
[ Laughter ]
Anyway, it's by Jeffrey Schaler, Ph.D, and I
agree with this guy.
He says, "All of addiction is a
choice."
That's the title of the book.
"From heroin to coffee," he says,
"it's a
matter of free will and it's not a disease.
And being hooked is a choice.
Every time you make it, it's a choice."
Drew: Who starts?
Scott: You can go.
[ Laughter ]
I have a few things to say about this.
Bill: Yeah, go ahead.
Drew: That is somebody who's never dealt with
the disease.
One of the things we try to get people to
overcome when they have this disease is even
the sense that they could use their willpower
in relation, other than getting them to
treatment.
The disease is an operation --
it's basically a hijacking of the survival
mechanisms.
The survival drive, the survival reward
systems, that then become focused on a
particular drug as the requisite of survival.
Is that making sense so far?
Bill: No.
[ Laughter ]
Drew: No.
Bill: It doesn't.
It's not involuntary.
Drew: To initiate it is not.
And there's no doubt, in our culture today,
people learn that the way they manage
unpleasant feelings is sex and drugs and fast
cars and money, and it doesn't work.
But if have you a biological predisposition
to
condition --
Bill: It worked for a while.
Drew: You're still working on it, Bill, I
understand that, but be that as it may, if
you
have a predisposition to condition your
reward
system, some drives begin operating that
operate --
that overwhelm your willpower very easily.
Bill: He says the conventional wisdom is that
once you use the drug, something changes in
your body.
And that change -- which has never been
identified --
Drew: -- It's worked out --
plasmic changes has been worked out.
It has been highly --
Bill: But then how come so many people are
able
to quit?
Scott: Let me -- come in for second.
First of all, choice, I know a little bit
about
drug use.
[ Laughter ]
But I also --
[ Applause ]
But I also know about the other side of it as
well.
It's a choice when you -- to your teens,
whether you want to pick up and start
experimenting with drugs.
It's a choice once you're able to get detoxed
-- for a person who is an addict or an
alcoholic, it is a choice --
once you do have some distance from it -- if
you want to pick up again, once you're free
from it -- but once there's something that
happens -- and Drew was saying this --
there's
something that happens.
If I were to go and pick up and try to have a
glass of wine or a Rum and Coke or whatever,
there's a phenomenon of craving that takes
place that doesn't happen with everybody
else.
There's something that happens where --
Bill: But the craving is still a matter of
free
choice.
Unless you're shooting smack in your sleep --
Drew: It's a hijacking of the survival
mechanism.
So the brain -- not -- with thought.
This is the part of the brain that doesn't
have
language and logic or language, but it
believes
that it won't survive without the drug.
That's the intensity of the craving.
Helen: That is so fancy and so complicated
that
I'm not sure I know what you're talking
about.
I think --
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Not to be disrespectful, there are all kinds
of
addictions, and you're talking about drugs.
My sister was an alcoholic.
And she was absolutely convinced that it was
systemic or indigenous and I say [ bleep ] --
excuse me --
[ Laughter ]
You have a means of saying no, and there's
shopping addiction and sex addiction -- and I
have a fudge brownie addiction -- but I can
say
"No" if I really insist on it.
I just think it's a matter of choice.
Scott: Well, it's not a matter of choice,
though.
Here's the thing --
Kim: I don't think it is for everybody.
Scott: With shopping even -- all right --
someone who is a shopping addict, you're okay
and you don't have to go on a $50,000 in
two-day shopping binge if you don't start.
You know?
But once, like, you get into that mode of,
you're there on Rodeo Drive -- I don't know.
That's probably where you shop, I would've
guessed.
[ Laughter ]
And you start buying, something happens.
And, I think, a lot of it, too, is like --
it's
not just a physical thing, it's also like, a
three-pronged kind of thing.
It's like, also, there's a mental thing.
It's like something that happens for whatever
reason, from this big up to this big, you
don't
feel right about yourself -- and you start to
learn that through medicating -- medicating
the
way you feel, it starts to make you feel like
you think everyone else feels, like a whole
person.
And so when you're left with those empty
feelings and there's nothing -- you're not
treating it with any kind of way, no kind of
program --
Drew: You can't.
Your brain won't let you.
Bill: But at some point, you made the choice
not to.
Drew: You didn't make a choice.
Scott: With the help of other people --
Drew: With the help of law enforcement.
[ Laughter ]
Scott: Yeah, law enforcement.
Enough distance --
[ Applause ]
Bill: But many people have.
Many people have.
I quit smoking.
Smoking was a bitch.
Drew: You're not an addict.
You're dependent on tobacco, but it's
different
than addiction.
Bill: Tobacco, they say, is harder to quit
than
heroin.
Scott: Oh, it is.
It is.
But there's a difference.
There are people who go through periods of
their life, went through heavy drinking
binges.
Bill: If you made that choice at one point,
that choice -- it means, was always available
to you at any point.
Drew: I wish --
May I speak liberally, please?
Bill: Yes, definitely.
Drew: I had the opportunity to see Scott when
he was in the throes of his disease -- and --
I'm delighted that he is alive.
And I told him --
[ Applause ]
I told him if I could just put him in a room
and lock the door, in 30 days, the biology
would be different, and he would be able
then,
to begin making choices.
But in the throes of the biology, there was
--
he couldn't make sense of his behavior or
anything.
Scott: There literally -- there literally is
something that happens --
Kim: Are you gonna keep on making excuses for
it?
Is that your -- the possibility that it might
be genetically programmed or genetically
possible?
Or is it that you're afraid that people are
using that as an excuse?
Is that what it is?
Or, you know -- because there are people who
can quit.
There are people who fight that addiction.
I do think it's --
Drew: Way off.
Kim: No, not at all.
It can be done, but I don't think it should
be
used as an excuse.
Drew: All that is controlled early in their
disease.
Helen: But food can be an addiction, also.
Scott: I have an eating disorder as well.
I know about that.
I know about that.
It's like, when I start --
Helen: But that's not genetic, it's because
you
don't have any willpower.
You don't know how to pass up --
Scott: No willpower?
Kim: I think the root of it is self-esteem.
I don't know, you're the author, you tell me
--
Scott: Check this out, all right.
Listen.
When you're in the throes of being strung
out,
okay?
And you're trying, you're trying to like,
stop,
you're trying to stop.
The insanity that goes on inside your brain
is
so overwhelming that no matter what
consequences are staring at you right in the
face, you cannot look at it as any reasonable
reason to stop because you're just craving
that
relief from that chemical so intensely.
Drew: Again, the brain believes it will not
survive the craving.
It won't survive those impulses unless
they're
gratified.
And what happens is, thinking gets distorted
into "I'll just get high this moment,
and then
I'll be okay."
Bill: But to call it a disease, I think, is
not
fair to people who have a disease where they
have zero choice.
If you have diabetes or cancer or any disease
--
Scott: But it's categorized in the mental
illness category.
Drew: What is a disease?
Define "Disease."
Let's define --
Bill: Something over which you have no choice
that just strikes you.
Drew: Something that strikes you.
But it's -- so, if a piano falls on your head
--
Bill: And you can't quit cancer, Doc.
You just can't quit cancer.
Drew: But you can choose not to get
treatment.
Scott: Yeah.
Helen: Well, that's not an addiction.
[ Applause ]
Scott: It's like you have -- you know about
clinical depression and bipolar disorder and
all these sorts of other mental illnesses.
I mean, there are other ones that are much
more
drastic than those, and those can be
life-threatening.
A person who doesn't get treated for that
can't
stop that kind of thinking.
Can't start feeling, "I know I'm feeling
depressed right now and I want to kill
myself,
but I'm gonna make a decision not to feel
this
way right now."
Drew: That's right.
Bill: Well, I'm addicted to commercials.
We have to go away for a moment.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Bill: All right.
We were talking about addiction.
And Helen --
[ Laughter ]
I wanted to ask you, do you think you could
become addicted to orgasms?
Do you think you could have just so many
orgasms, one after another, Earth-shattering
--
Helen: What?
[ Laughter ]
Bill: Well, I mean "Cosmo" --
orgasm is such a
natural question.
Okay.
Let me -- you also mentioned --
[ Laughter ]
Your sister was in A.A.
This doctor who wrote this book -- I love
this
-- he compares A.A. to a cult, which I would
think is probably fairly true, because I
think
the addiction to total sobriety is the most
dangerous of all.
He says, "My concern is that A.A. has
become a
tool of the state.
The state arrests people for drunken driving
--"
don't I know it.
[ Laughter ]
-- "And then orders them into alcoholics
anonymous, and that's a violation of the
first
amendment, separation of church and
state."
I would agree with that.
Scott: Well, you know what?
If that cult is able to put people's lives
back
together and people's families back together
and people's careers back together, then hail
the cult!
[ Cheers and applause ]
Drew: There's a misconception here about the
whole notion of higher power.
Isn't that what you're taking issue with, is
the advocacy of higher power?
Higher power really is, as a concept, just to