Last week was the third-season premiere of A&E’s Intervention (Fridays, 10 pm), the show in which junkies of various sorts are followed around for a bit, confronted by their distraught families, and then — if they’re in the requisite state of passivity/confusion — whisked off to treatment centers with sinister, Philip K. Dickian names: Happy Hearts Wellness Facility, Sunshine Valley Fulfillment Clinic, and so on. The subject this time was a young man called Ryan who shoots up crushed Oxycontin 15 times a day. “I live in beautiful California,” narrated Ryan drowsily, “I love our neighborhood. It’s very nice and clean.” A minute later he was irritably jabbing a needle into his arm, looking for a vein; shortly thereafter he was hit by a car. The next morning he was in his mother’s suburban garden smoking a moody cig: his stepfather Paul was out there too, smoking an equally moody cig. (Paul is an alcoholic.) Paul asked Ryan what happened to his guitar. Did he sell it for drugs? “I don’t give a fuck about a guitar,” said Ryan. “I just got hit by a car.” Paul: “Yeah, well, it’s a fuckin’ rhyme.”
Oxycontin addicts, we were told, are distinguished by their “severe apathy,” and Ryan seemed true to type. Long-bodied, one eye wandering as if he were an El Greco, he flopped sadly about, illuminating his plight with a fitful marsh-gas wit. “I really don’t feel it almost whatsoever,” he sighed after one bloody bathroom session. “I don’t know if that’s because I took too little. I just know that I still hurt, which is the reason I wanted the pill in the first place.” He sighed again. “It’s very upsetting.” After the intervention, Ryan detoxed at a place called New Vision, got himself kicked out of Ark of Little Cottonwood, and finally went AWOL from the Oasis Treatment Center.
Next week: TLC’s Shalom in the Home, with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Stay tuned.
