No, Oprah is not on drugs. But she is getting arguably as into the topic as she ever has (aside from that whole Million Little Pieces thing). On her show Oprah Prime (which apparently used to be called Oprah’s Next Chapter, in case there are people out there who actually care about other words in the title besides the big O), she’ll be “delving into heroin,” according to USA Today. And the guest who will be helping her get into it is none other than Russell Brand—recovery’s most charming advocate.
An Outspoken Brand
Brand, who’s been sober over a decade, has never been shy about telling people about his addiction and sobriety—or about his strong opinions related to that. He wrote about his disdain for drug laws in The Guardian in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death and wrote oh so beautifully about the experience of being an addict roughly a year before (also in The Guardian). My favorite lines from that piece were these:
I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion….I look to drugs and booze to fill up a hole in me; unchecked, the call of the wild is too strong. I still survey streets for signs of the subterranean escapes that used to provide my sanctuary. I still eye the shuffling subclass of junkies and dealers, invisibly gliding between doorways through the gutters.
Advertising Addiction
His Oprah interview will surely be more Oprah-ized and therefore less eloquent but I have no doubt he will help the cause. But I’m guessing this special is a way to introduce the new reality show about Lindsay Lohan’s sobriety—a show Lohan herself is apparently trying to distance herself from. As she told Jimmy Fallon:
It is a television show so they want ratings—they picked the first two months after I got back to New York after I had been in treatment. I became really spiritual over this past year and I have been trying to find peace and serenity in my life. So of course they take the chaos of me moving after eight years of living in L.A. back to the city of New York. So it’s like “Oprah reprimands Lindsay!”
Look, I’m always glad when the public is hearing the truth about addiction; I’m just not sure paying someone who’s clearly struggled with addiction a cool $2 mill to have cameras follow her around and watching what happens is the way to do it. But I’m a big Brand fan so maybe a potentially exploitative Lilo reality show + Brand = some good info. Who knows? I’ve never been good at math.
Photo courtesy of Eva Rinaldi from Sydney Australia (Eva Rinaldi Photography Uploaded by Kafuffle) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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