Archive for June, 2010
Most accidents require an alcoholic. This includes great and tragic ones, including oil gushers.
Accidents are unplanned, unexpected and adverse events. Absent the whims of nature, arguably well over half of these events involve alcoholism. In Drunks, Drugs & Debits: How to Recognize Addicts and Avoid Financial Abuse, a study of automobile plant employees is cited that reported an 82 percent reduction in accidents a year after treating its employees for alcoholism. Other studies are cited showing that at least one of the participants in 70 to 90 percent of snowmobile, workplace and incendiary accidents is under the influence at the time of the incident, which is an almost certain indicator of alcoholism. On pages 66-67 of How to Spot Hidden ...
Lots of runners-up, including a Congressman who thinks Guam could tip over and sink.
Runners-up for top story of the month:
Tiger Woods, who has reportedly blamed cheating on his drug addiction which, he says, impaired his judgment. This is one of those classic instances where almost everyone is looking in the wrong place: his obvious sexual compulsions. Since alcohol and other-drug addiction most often provides the springboard for compulsive behaviors, especially of the destructive variety, they are eyeing only a symptom (and probably one of many that go unreported). It’s also said that a full-time outpatient therapist now monitors Tiger to keep him from taking drugs and cheating. Most people still think he is merely a “sex addict” and that once this is treated everything will be fine. Memo to Tiger: no, it won’t ...
Under watch: Melissa Huckabee and investment adviser Albert Vilar. Our codependent is the British medical journal “The Lancet”.
Under watch:
In an early 2009 piece on white collar crime, The Economist magazine suggests there may be some truth in something those who have read my books would predict: “Many [Club Fed and other white collar] prisoners suddenly discover, post-conviction, that they had a drinking problem….” I would add that those who don’t figure this out might benefit from greater introspection. In the spirit of The Economist’s discovery, recent stories follow for which the evidence of alcoholism is in the behavior itself.
Melissa Huckaby, 29, pleading guilty to the 2009 slaying of her daughter’s 8-year-old playmate Sandra Cantu in Tracy, California, in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table and dropping charges of rape. She had previously been charged ...
Enablers include sheriff’s deputies and those close to well-known celebrities. Disenablers include non-celebrity scared kids–and a great judge.
Enablers of the month:
Orange County, California sheriff’s deputies, who allowed fellow Deputy Allan James Waters, 36, to keep driving his Mercedes-Benz after one accident—only to be called to another incident 30 minutes later in which he injured another driver. This time, they arrested him for DUI. Message to cops: you don’t do anyone favors by offering “professional courtesies”. As is true throughout the field of alcoholism, helping only hurts and, sometimes, kills.
Singer Whitney Houston’s sister-in-law Pat Houston, who told reporters, “Whitney is doing fine. Some people have said cruel things, but she’s happy just to have rested in [London’s Dorchester] hotel” after a hospital stay with an “upper respiratory infection” and “allergies.” A month earlier she was seen “partying” with ...
Sometimes it takes an addict to create revolutionary change. So long, with regrets, Dennis Hopper and baseball great Willie Davis
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
Actor Dennis Hopper, dead from complications of advanced prostate cancer at age 74. According to Rolling Stone Magazine, Hopper was one of “Hollywood’s most notorious drug addicts for 20 years.” For a period in the 1970s he was ostracized by Hollywood for being a “difficult” actor. No wonder: for the last five years before he stopped drinking and drugging in the mid-‘80s, his addiction had grown to “doing half a gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, 28 beers and 3 grams of cocaine a day—and that wasn’t getting high, that was just to keep going.” He was married five times, including to Michelle Phillips for two weeks and, more recently, Victoria ...
Hit and runs are under the influence. Treat them that way criminally.
Those convicted of hit-and-run should be treated as if they were under the influence for purposes of sentencing.
Since motorists committing hit and runs are almost always under the influence, I’ve long thought they should be treated as DUIs in the criminal justice system. Now someone is working toward that goal, albeit with different wording: defendants convicted of hit-and-run would face the same prison terms as drunk drivers who cause accidents.
USC student Adriana Bachan, 18, was killed by a DUI in the early hours of March 29, 2009. Claudia Cabrera, 31, had been drinking at a party earlier in the evening. Her driver’s license was already suspended and a lawsuit was pending in connection with a previous collision. Bachan was in ...
Toxic tenant with children could be lethal to landlord and children alike
Dear Doug
There are so many possibilities this month: the verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive foul-mouthed mother whose third husband appears to have no idea about her past….the woman who divorced her husband over two years ago and who, despite the fact that he belittles and trashes her and is “manic-depressive,” she lets stay in her home because he claims to be broke after gambling it all away and she would feel guilty about forcing him out….the sister who complains that her parents enable her recently graduated unemployed 27-year-old brother who told her “the magic bill-paying fairies” take care of his expenses while he plays video games and “gets high”….the woman who worries that her sister, who “may have a mental ...
R-rated movies don’t cause early drinking; alcoholic parents do.
“Middle-schoolers who are forbidden to watch R-rated movies are less likely to start drinking than peers whose parents are more lenient about such films.”
So found researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, reporting that among those whose parents let them watch R-rated movies “all the time,” almost a quarter had drank without their parents’ knowledge. Only 3% had tried a drink among those “never allowed” to watch R-rated movies. While the researchers controlled for parenting style, there was nothing said about the parents’ level of alcohol use and alcoholism.
Aligning cause and effect between movies and drinking ignores the fact that the less disciplined a child, the greater the likelihood that a parent is an alcohol or other-drug addict (“out of control children” ...
Waxing and driving
It was quite a challenge to select this month’s antic. It could have been Elsa Benson, 53, who likes to call 911 on non-emergencies (“my husband won’t eat his supper”) when she gets drunk (30 calls in one recent six-month period); Gregory J. Oras, 37, who called 911 three times saying he was being attacked and who, when officers arrived finding no signs of a fight, asked that the nice officers give him a ride to a local bar (he was instead driven to a place with other kinds of bars); or Lorraine Bulloch who, during an argument with her brother over the fact that he brought home the wrong brand of beer, threw a knife that missed him and ...
Alcoholism and your clients; a good summary of my research and its applications to real life
March-May 2010 / Issue No. 54
You may have been wondering about TAR.
We released at least one during every tax season since beginning publication in August 2005. Your faithful correspondent just didn't get inspired enough by any particular event to come up with a Top Story during this year's busy Season, and without a Top Story it's tough to get motivated on the rest (even though there were plenty of less important stories to write about).
In addition, since the end of Season I've caught up on real life (including business in both Las Vegas and Colorado) and written a speech I'll be giving in June before the California Society of Enrolled Agents, which requires a 20-30 page workbook ...