Stopping Drugs Press Review

Cutting Free of Drugs
NEW YORK DIAL, February 1987
by Christopher Hallowell

There are no hidden faces in Stopping Drugs. There are no concealed voices. What we see in the film is what it’s like to try to kick drugs in a detoxification and rehabilitation center. “It’s not a happy story,” says producer Hector Galán. “In group therapy they make you look at yourself in a mirror and see yourself as you are. Most of them don’t make it.”

The film, the first of a two-part special on Frontline this month, focuses on a twenty-one day treatment program in a federally funded center outside of Austin, Texas, Galán’s hometown. (Part two journeys into America’s schools to find out if anti-drug efforts are working. The statistics are discouraging. Thirty-four percent of all high school seniors are regular drug users). It is a dilapidated and isolated place with broken furniture, bunk beds, and a cafeteria that serves barely palatable food. It is for drug addicts, many of them referred by the court and without the money to pay the thousands of dollars per day that some private detoxification centers charge for drying someone out.

When Galán - who has produced four other Frontline films, including Standoff in Mexico and Chasing the Basketball Dream - decided he wanted to make a film on drugs, he faced a dilemma. Such films had been done before, and he did not want to cover worn turf. He also knew that nearly all films on the subject treated addicts as aberrants and criminals. He would take another route, get involved with the addicts, win their trust, and then film them openly. “The people in the center had something in life,” he says. “The lost it to drugs. They are the kind of people you see on the subway, a cross section, people like you and me.”

There’s Debby, twenty-two years old, first pregnant at fifteen and now a mother of three. She had been on speed for ten years.

There’s Jay, twenty-six, a business entrepreneur who initially started a shrimp processing plant and then went into real estate development before blowing a million dollars on drugs in only a few months. His habit got so bad that every time he shot up, he passed out for twenty hours and woke up with the needle still sticking out of his arm.

Ron was a college football star who had been awarded a lavish football scholarship. He got involved in cocaine. His coach found out and kicked him off the team. He went downhill from there.

And there’s Mike, thirty-three, so addicted to speed that he lost his car repair business. Then he got arrested and was put into the rehabilitation program by court order. But he couldn’t take the silent pain of detoxification. The film witnesses him as he begins shooting up again.

This is what happens to most people in drug programs, no matter what the addict’s motivation for quitting or their social or economic circumstances, eighty percent return to drugs. Yet the kind of rehabilitation offered by the center where addicts are forced to face their addiction through a process of self-realization is the most effective known.

When Galán was filming during group therapy sessions, he often heard the expression, “You have to really hit bottom.” Those who had not “hit bottom” were likely to go back on drugs. It was the people who knew they were at the bottom who most wanted to free themselves of drugs. “If you don’t have the ‘want’,” Galán says, “You’re not going to be able to do it.”

Series: FRONTLINE
National Airdate: February 10, 1987
Network: PBS
A harrowing look at the lives of those who seek treatment for drug addiction.

Hector Galán: Producer, Director, Writer, Editor