HBO Series on addiction

On Thursday, March 15, HBO will premier an ambitious series of documentaries entitled Addiction. Although HBO is a premium cable service usually costing an extra $10 or more per month, they are offering their service for free to regular cable and satellite subscribers during the four-day weekend beginning March 15, and all the shows will play at some point during that time. According to the press kit they sent me, you'll also be able to stream the shows from their website. (It's not clear whether all 14 programs will be available in this form. Right now all that's up is a short teaser video. [Update: The series publicist informs me that the entire series will be available online after it airs])

I watched the 90-minute "centerpiece" documentary yesterday (it premiers on HBO at 9 p.m. March 15). Like many people, I have several family members with addictions, with a profound effect on me and the rest of my family. Some of my relatives have successfully managed their addiction, others still struggle with it, and one person -- my stepsister -- died before she turned 30 as a direct result of her illness, leaving two children behind. Watching this film evoked some painful memories, and brought me to tears on more than one occasion.

The film is really a set of shorts, each exploring a different aspect of the problem of addiction. The first segment is a grisly Texas emergency room, where more than 50 percent of the patients admitted on a typical weekend are there due to drug or alcohol abuse. We watch as a team tries for 17 minutes to resuscitate a 26-year-old man who crashed his motorcycle when he was high. They fail, and he dies before our eyes. Another man broke his ankle in a parking lot after drinking "only" a six pack. The hospital representatives suggest that he should probably get treatment for his addiction, but in the end all they can do is fix his ankle and send him home.

Particularly poignant for me was a segment called "A Mother's Desperation."

The segment documents a mother's efforts to reclaim her 23-year-old daughter from the streets. The girl, an attractive former cheerleader, reminded my of my stepsister Marie. When I was a teenager, I attended AA meetings with Marie in an effort to be supportive as she tried to stay sober. Like my family, and like millions of others who struggle with relatives and loved ones with addictions, the mother in the video was doing everything she could to try to help her daughter. The daughter, who appeared to honestly want to recover, smirked cynically when asked if this latest attempt at detox -- her seventh -- would work.

Most of the centerpiece segments don't go into much detail discussing the psychology and medicine behind addiction, but they do feature an impressive array of experts offering commentary and background details to supplement the stories being shown. And despite the depressing nature of the topic, the show does offer some hope, including two segments on promising new drugs for treating opiate and alcohol addiction. But I'd still like to know more -- what we're seeing, by and large, is case studies. How about some details about how well these treatments work? The centerpiece is only designed to be an introduction to the topic, so perhaps the other shows in the series will provide more details. I'll be viewing them over the course of the next few days, so I'll keep you updated and try to point out the ones most worth watching.

You can find out more on HBO's web site. Here's the schedule of all the shows.