Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (40 page)

“One month of Vivitrol—FREE! Vivitrol—the shot that’ll help you stay sober.”

I called the number on that flyer a dozen times and left messages with various people and answering machines trying to make an appointment to get the shot. No one ever called me back. I left my cell phone number, home phone number, and email address. I’d finally decided to try medication, and now the fuckers wouldn’t give me any.

The shot was $1,000 a month, and although my savings were running out I was willing to pay anything if it would help. The shot was supposed to inhibit cravings. I wanted that shot, and getting that shot suddenly became very important to me. I started researching Vivitrol and found it was an opiate blocker. It blocked all good feelings—everything from sexual feelings to enjoyment of food; emotions, including love; work-out highs; everything. Suddenly I was relieved that no one had returned my calls.

I kept on searching for a medical answer and in the spring of 2008 decided to go on Antabuse. My SAG insurance wouldn’t cover it, but I figured it was worth the $350 if it worked. I did my research first and found myself in the same predicament as with Vivitrol. You think the list of side effects you hear rattled off on TV commercials for prostate drugs is bad? Here’s the small print on Antabuse:

Seek medical attention right away if any of these SEVERE side effects occur when using Antabuse:

Severe allergic reactions (rash; hives; difficulty breathing; tightness in the chest; swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue); blurred vision; changes in color vision; dark urine; loss of appetite; mental or mood problems; nausea; numbness or tingling of the arms or legs; seizures; tiredness; vomiting; weakness; yellowing of the eyes or skin.

I mean, seriously, who’d put that in their body? Alcohol seemed like a milder poison than that. Good Lord, addicts are a confused lot! And a poor lot. Being an addict ain’t cheap: $200 an hour for therapy, $350 for Antabuse prescriptions, $3,500 for detox, $30,000-plus for rehab.

I was half mad with frustration and physically, emotionally, and financially drained.

But those angels must have been watching out for me, because while researching Antabuse, I stumbled on an article in the British newspaper
The Guardian
about something called The Sinclair Method. I didn’t know it then but that article would change my life.

That detox from hell, with all its horrific side effects, would be my last. The monster didn’t know it yet, but she was beaten.

EXTINCTION AGENDA

In the time leading up to my discovery of The Sinclair Method, I could sense that change was in the wind. For starters, after three years of silence, the phone rang and I booked a job on the TV show
Nip/Tuck
.

But would the coming change be for better or worse? Life is seldom cut and dried. Something that starts out well can turn bad and vice versa.

After my stint in the detox center I’d moved out of the place I was sharing with David. I needed space to save our relationship, space to see whether the wind would turn for or against me. I had an acting job, and that, as always, was my life raft. I clung to it, focusing on getting healthy and staying sober.

I was living with my friend Trish and running laps around Lake Hollywood, working out as hard and as often as my body could take it; I had to appear naked on TV. The anxiety I felt as a teenager about seeing my butt on a fifty-foot-high screen was nothing compared to that of being a detoxing fortysomething who was going to bare her all on a popular TV series.

What I failed to keep in mind was that a fortysomething body can’t be molded as easily as that of a young woman injecting horse piss on a 500-calorie-a-day diet or even a woman in her thirties doing hundreds of lunges in preparation for
Playboy
. I pounded the pavement so hard it threw my back out. My pelvis and lower back felt like they were swimming beneath my skin, and each time they moved (which was any time I did anything apart from lie on my back) I felt a debilitating pain.

Luckily, that happened toward the end of my training regime, so I looked great, but it meant that I was in extreme pain all the way through the shoot. That would have been fine if we were shooting a period drama and all I had to do was sit in a high-backed chair and look statuesque, but for this particular episode the scriptwriters had come up with some particularly weird shit.

I was cast as a woman who pays Julian McMahon’s character to satisfy a bizarre sexual fetish.
First, he would throw me into a tub filled with ice and keep me there until my heart stopped from hypothermia, then he would carry my numb body to the bed, throw me on it, and fuck me back to life, the heat from his body kick-starting my heart back into action.

I mean, how fucking weird is that? But it didn’t stop me from taking the role. My career was as frozen as my body when the stunt man ripped me out of the bath and threw me on the bed. Maybe this job, so long in coming, would drive the life back into it.

When
Nip/Tuck
wrapped I drove straight to Trish’s house and raided her cupboards. The pain, combined with the stress of creating what I hoped would be my comeback performance, had knocked down the last of my defenses. I found a bottle of vodka and drank practically the whole thing in one sitting.

The Sinclair Method has successfully helped moderate alcohol drinking in Finland, where excessive alcohol use is a major national problem, as well as other countries including Israel, Russia, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Venezuela and Estonia. A statistical analysis of the data obtained from clinics in Finland shows highly significant reductions in alcohol drinking. The method is successful with more than 78% of alcoholics. In Florida the success rates since 2002 have been more than 85%. During the treatment program when shown on a graph a pattern emerges. It was always a classical extinction curve: drinking and craving became progressively lower with each week of treatment.

That was from a scientific article I read called “Clinical Evidence from The Sinclair Method Clinic in Sarasota, Florida.” The Florida clinic was the only one in the United States offering the Sinclair Method. The clinic’s website said:

Internationally hundreds of thousands of people have been helped using the Sinclair Method.

More than 80% of all the clients in the program were successful in long term control of their alcohol consumption, some to acceptable levels (“Social Drinking”) and others to complete abstinence. For those who desired to control their alcohol consumption, their drinking was reduced to an average of 1 drink per day. These same individuals had at one point consumed anywhere from 24 to 50 drinks or more a week. Some of The Sinclair Method’s successful patients had consumed more than 200 ounces of alcohol a week prior to the program.
⁶

An 80% success rate! Apart from the grim reaper, who has the only 100% guaranteed cure for addiction, I’d never heard of a treatment with such a high rate of success. What’s more, the article made an astonishing claim—that The Sinclair Method was a genuine cure for alcoholism.

The word “cure” is a powerful one and can’t be used lightly. The Sinclair Method makes use of a drug called naltrexone, which creates a state of pharmacological extinction in the addict’s brain. It doesn’t block the effect of alcohol; rather, it gradually resets the brain back to the pre-addiction condition, making it a bona fide cure.

But there was one catch: the cure only remained a cure as long as you took the pill, every time before you had a drink, for the rest of your life. Otherwise the endorphins released when drinking would not be blocked by the effect of naltrexone and would lead the brain to revert to a state of craving alcohol.

I researched naltrexone and found that it had been available and FDA-approved for the treatment of alcoholism since 1994. It was nonaddictive, and the side effects were minor and temporary—nausea, headaches, and insomnia.
Sign me up!

The Florida clinic charged $3,800 for treatment, beyond my budget by that stage. Luckily, I found a book,
The Cure for Alcoholism
by Roy Eskapa, PhD.

The book had an introduction by David Sinclair, PhD, who developed The Sinclair Method, which described alcoholism as a learned chemical addiction of the brain. Sinclair maintains that abstinence only makes the problem worse, and I’d made the biggest mistake in the book: I’d gone stone-cold sober after every binge. The sudden deprivation of alcohol only led to stronger cravings. This not only leads to eventual relapse but also damages the brain and internal organs. What no one at rehab or detox centers ever tells you is that you can detox by gradually reducing your alcohol intake. The reason no one thinks to mention this is that most alcoholics aren’t capable of doing it. But with naltrexone it’s made possible by one amazing, almost unbelievable fact—that The Sinclair Method only works as a cure if the alcoholic keeps on drinking.

You take naltrexone to reduce your consumption, and at the same time it kills off your addiction. My armor was battered and hanging on by its fraying straps, but now I’d have something to fight the monster with that I’d never had before—a weapon. I’d always been on the defensive, on the back foot while the monster attacked at will. If the claims about The Sinclair Method were true I just might be able to obliterate that bitch once and for all.

The Cure for Alcoholism
contained all the information I needed to start The Sinclair Method solo. The first step was to find a doctor who would prescribe naltrexone, which costs about $30 for thirty 50 mg pills—about a dollar added to the cost of a night out. Even better, I was able to use my SAG insurance, which brought the cost down even more to $10 for thirty pills.

By taking one pill one hour before drinking I could begin the process of pharmacological extinction.

I was still not turned on by the idea of taking a pill forever, but hell, if it worked it was better than going to an AA meeting and fighting the war every fucking day for the rest of my life. And the other thing that resonated with me was The Sinclair Method’s treatment of alcoholism as a disease, like diabetes or high blood pressure. It was a relief to know that someone had devised a safe, medically proven, nonaddictive way to combat it.

Following on from the use of naltrexone, the book encouraged using the beneficial effect of the drug to strengthen healthy, alternative behaviors—eating tasty meals, exercise, sports, even sex.

I went in to see my doctor, armed with a copy of
The Cure for Alcoholism
. I’d been fighting every day for the last ten years. I wanted peace, I wanted my life back, and I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

The doctor was a nice young guy who a pill-popping friend had recommended, one used to dealing with addicts. I’d seen him once before when I was suffering a combo attack of flu and alcohol withdrawal. He’d prescribed some anti-anxiety pills to deal with the monster and an antibiotic for the flu. The flu went the way of the dodo; the monster didn’t bat an eyelid.