Hollywood HIGH

Maybe you'd never believe (as I didn't, at first) that you can score drugs at those funky storefront places where folks hang out for hours listening to '50s jazz on mismatched furniture while sipping so-so cappuccino. You'd be wrong. You certainly cannot score drugs at any trendy coffeehouse; many of them are clean as a whistle, and serve as post-Alcoholics Anonymous meeting places. It's not like the owners are dealing--a few of them are kids who have kicked habits themselves. It's more likely that nobody knows what dope deals go down in the restrooms of such joints except the people who want to know. "Where else are people expected to look spacey while they babble about things they don't know anything about?" observes an industry source. "You can sit for hours and wait for your dealer to drop by, and no one ever asks you to leave, nor even to buy a second cup of java. Sure, maybe the dealer's not selling the purest, cleanest stuff, but it'll do. It's this casual, completely unspoken-about, totally crazed thing."

Do you want to talk crazed? Then surely, the displacement of once all-popular cocaine by heroin strikes me--especially in the age of AIDS--as the most soul-shaking trend in young Hollywood's drug use. Statistics say there may be as many as 700,000 heroin addicts in the United States. Nobody's keeping statistics on heroin use in Hollywood; somebody would have to admit there's a problem, first. It's tough to conjure up an image of a great-looking, highly paid young star injecting or otherwise ingesting heroin. "H" users are prone to malnutrition, circulation problems, tuberculosis and overdose--none of which are even remotely photogenic. Heroin also creates a spiraling, all-consuming cycle of "craving-seeking-use" that, by comparison, makes sex, relationships and career moves pale. Yet, "H" use appears to be on the upswing among some of the young and famous. "When you're so far gone, snorting coke or doing crack," says a hip movie director, "the next step doesn't seem like such a reach."

"It's shocking the number of major stars who have been linked to heroin," says a member of Hollywood's hip community. "They're not rockers or rappers. They're actors, they're people who seem like they could be your next door neighbors. And they're so young and strong that they can still look good and keep doing what they're doing until they actually collapse. Look at Corey Haim, Corey Feldman or Drew Barrymore, who never looked like what they were doing. I mean, how bad can someone in their teens or twenties look, even at their worst?"

Most Hollywood drug abuse goes undetected until--if the user is lucky--he checks himself (or someone checks him) into a rehab clinic like the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California or the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota. The industry response to drug abuse problems has been uneven. A handful of movie studios host weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The Cocaine Anonymous group at Cedars Sinai hospital has acted as a magnet for members of the moviemaking community. "Hollywood is most concerned with the bottom line," says a therapist with the Referral and Assistance Center, one of many local treatment facilities for celebrity addictions. "As an industry, we need to realize how problems with addictions contribute to production time. Hours spent dealing with emotional crises, the constant stress--these cost money. Once a talented person is lost to drugs or alcohol, he's gone. That ought to be sad enough. But maybe Hollywood also needs to hear that once he's gone, no more money can be made off him."

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Charles Oakley is a freelance writer who occasionally goes undercover for Movieline.

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