Note: Anthony Bourdain, an executive chef in New York City, is author
of ''Kitchen Confidential.'' He wrote this article for the Los
Angeles Times.

COMMENTARY: FROM JAIL TO 'ALLY MCBEAL,' ADDICT GROPES HIS WAY TOWARD BOTTOM

There is no one less sympathetic to the humiliations of an addict
than an ex-junkie. I hear that familiar, whiny tone of voice. I see
the pinned, cartoon eyes of the smack user or the jumpy, twitchy,
molar-grinding, gibberish-spewing face of the coke fiend. I see a
dead man. I'm not listening anymore.

Cold? Yes. But then, junkies are used to stone-cold logic. Life, for
someone whose body, brain, nerves and cell tissue requires (rather
than desires) his drug of choice in order to get out of bed in the
morning, is actually a very simple matter. You have one job: Get
drugs.

Those of us who have been addicted to heroin and/or cocaine (and I've
been addicted to both) understand this better than anybody. You know,
without question, that your best friend will steal your drugs or your
money or snitch you off to the cops. You know how low you would go to
get what you need.

Stories about drugs and rehabilitation are boring -- particularly
when it's some Hollywood actor, grinning out from the cover of People
magazine. We've heard it all before. Some people live; others die.
Who survives and who doesn't seems most often to have been determined
long before the junkie enters treatment -- when he looks in the
mirror one morning and decides that he really, truly wants to live.
If there's any question, then lose my number. I know you in my bones.

The memory of the bitter taste of heroin in the back of my throat,
the smell of burning candles, the taste of paint chips mistaken for a
pebble of dropped crack, a whiff of urine and stale air from long-ago
tenement drug superstores on the Lower East Side all came back when I
watched Robert Downey Jr. being hauled off again in handcuffs. And
this time, I actually cared a little.

"This guy must really hate himself," I thought, reading of cocaine
and speed allegedly found in his room. That he is, to my mind, one of
the finest actors working in Hollywood matters not at all. My first
thought, though, was, "Cocaine and speed? That's not comfortable
oblivion; that's pedal to the metal, headed straight for the wall."

It's more panic, paranoia, the inevitable crash. If there is a faster
route to the dung heap I don't know of it. It can't even be fun
anymore. After years of having as much cocaine as you want, you find
yourself just chasing that first pleasurable hit, looking to
recapture that first pleasant rush. You never find it.

More than likely, you wind up squatting naked by the front door,
listening for the tunneling probe microphones that aren't really
there.

"Ally McBeal" can't have helped. If I were an actor of Downey's
caliber, I can't say I'd be too happy with myself. I wondered
immediately: "The guy's right out of the joint! Who let him work a
job where he's going to have good reason to hate himself?"

People are very fragile when they leave rehab. For the first year, it
seems like the pleasure centers of the brain have shut down for good,
like your oldest and best love has died. This is not a time to
acquire new reasons for shame, fear, regret; you've had plenty of
that already. It's time to get away. Far away from old friends, old
haunts, old temptations. In the jargon of rehab, "bottoming out" is
mentioned frequently and annoyingly often as a prerequisite to
treatment.

When life is at least as unbearable with drugs as without, when the
thought of a fat stack of glassine envelopes or an eight-ball
promises only more misery, some people make that hard choice to tally
up the betrayals and the wreckage and keep living. It's not easy.
Many -- if not most -- fail. Most times, you really have to do
something terribly shameful before you see a life without drugs as a
preferred, even necessary, option.

Jail, in Downey's case, doesn't seem to have been enough. Hopefully,
"Ally McBeal" was.