A&E: Intervention

Intervention is an aptly named show on A&E about addicts of all stripes and their interventions.  Perhaps the only more apt name would be Family Attempts To Stop a Trainwreck, While You Watch. You Sick Bastard.  

As Matthew Gilbert of the Boston Globe told Salon.com: "It makes prime-time sport of vulnerable, desperate people and their spiral to the bottom." Oh yeah and, it's also great television.  A typical episode goes as follows: meet Allison, who dashed her med school dreams when she discovered inhalants junior year of college.  She does ten cans of computer dust remover a day.

Part 2: Gives you background on Allison and shows how great she was doing before. You know, playing the flute in fancy black dresses pearls.  Also: enter sugar daddy!

Part 3: Allison's sister absconds with her cans, mom brings pizza.

Part 4: The intervention with the Queen Baby goes poorly. 

Part 5: Allison chooses plush rehab, presumably on A&E's dime. 

It's like A&E ran out of the normal drugs, and started doing all the crazy ones like computer keyboard duster.  Aside from the natural drug-addict-on-a-downward-spiral-to-the-grave appeal, this episode is entrancing because people don't talk about inhalants very much.  The inhalants things is always a footnote during those D.A.R.E. lectures in 6th grade that is more confusing than enlightening.

Addiction Intervention Resources, Inc. prefers this kind of publicity about their business, interventions, as opposed to the fictionalized kind:

"I vividly remember the negative affect [sic.] the widely watched HBO-TV show The Soprano’s had on our business several years ago. During the episode entitled “The Strong, Silent Type,” a drug intervention is held for the heroin-addicted character Christopher. The intervention goes badly and ends with the intervention participants beating each other. Many families who watched that show believed this was the way a typical intervention ended. As a result of that, phone calls into our call centers virtually stopped for weeks." --Robert M. Poznanovich, CEO.

For realz-realz?! People thought this?! Nice.  So perhaps real-life interventions don't typically go down that poorly, but they do end poorly, and that honest portrayal (suspense!) is what I like.  It gets me line, hook and sinker. Does that make me a bad person? 

Bonus:  Cristy the Meth Addict.  And a spoof. 

(From Public School Intelligentsia, NYTimes, Salon.com, Blogcritics, Wikipedia, Buzzfeed, etc.)