PASADENA, CA–Spotted Dr. Drew Pinsky at the CNN TCA press tour party the other day and asked: can Rob Ford be saved?
You might have read or heard about Toronto’s mayor. Hizzonor has admitted he’s smoked crack cocaine and been on a few booze binges.
When I mentioned him to Greg Kinnear–who plays a boozin,’ gamblin’, cad of a lawyer on the upcoming Fox drama Rake, his face just lit up.
“He’s our guy!” he said for the writers on his show. “We write down everything he does!”
Pinsky has treated celebs with addiction problems for 30 years at his clinic in Pasadena and Ford sure seems like he’d be at home in Sober House or any of Dr. Drew’s past series.
“He has a problem and it’s dangerous,” Pinsky told me. “He’s going to have to do something about it eventually.”
Pinsky, who only knows Ford through news reports, says he takes “issue with the idea that talking about his condition should somehow shame him or maybe disqualify him as a bad person.”
He’d just like to see him get help.
Pinsky says he’s treated Canadians before.
“I used to work with the Canadian health care system,” he says. “They used to ship alcoholics to me by the plane load. Right here in Pasadena.” Thus was back in the early ’90s, he figures.
Pinsky ran a chemical dependency program not far from the press tour hotel. Canadian patients would spend six weeks in the program and then get shipped back across the border.
After a year or so, says Pinsky, he noticed he wasn’t getting paid. When he asked what was up, he was told it was a legislative thing in Canada.
When he eventually found out he was only going to get ten cents on the dollar, “that was the end of the relationships.”
Which was a shame, says Pinsky. “There are a lot of alcoholics in Canada,” he declares, adding that the Canucks he met, “were wonderful.”
“People who disdain and shame alcoholics—its silly,” he says. “They’re rich, nice people.”‘
