HOW TO GET HIGH IN HOLLYWOOD

The critics loved Traffic's realistic drug scenes. No wonder: the writer
spent years taking everything he could get his hands on. Rick Lyman met him

He spent one Christmas morning trying to steal crack cocaine from a dealer
who pulled a gun on him. But that wasn't enough to get him out of the
junkie's life. Nor was the time another dealer put a knife to his throat.
Nor even when a 300lb fellow inmate strung out on PCP chased him around a
Manhattan holding pen singing the theme from I Love Lucy. Not until July
1997, when Stephen Gaghan had been a drug user for more than a decade, did
he finally realise that he would have to change his life or die.

"Over one long, five-day weekend, I had three separate heroin dealers get
arrested," Gaghan recalls. "My dealer, my backup dealer and my
backup-backup dealer. I was left alone, and I hit that place, that total
incomprehensible demoralisation. That was the end of it; up five days
straight, locked in the bathroom, convinced there was nowhere else to go. I
had to kill myself."

You may have spotted Gaghan during the Golden Globe awards broadcast
recently, grinning when he won the best screenplay award for Steven
Soderbergh's Traffic, a drama set in the world of drug smugglers, dealers
and users. Next, it's thought, he could be nominated for an Oscar.

Gaghan, who is 35, thin, with a rough-edged look, says he has been clean
for three and a half years. But when he won his Emmy in 1997 (as one of the
writers for an episode of NYPD Blue), he was in the thick of heroin and
cocaine addiction. Now it is time to come clean about his past, a slow
spiral that started at a private school in Louisville, Kentucky.

"People were asking me where I got the characters and situations for
Traffic, and I found myself starting to speak in code," he says. He would
talk about research he had done in the drug culture, about unnamed
acquaintances, but he never admitted that a lot of it came from his own life.

"Part of the recovery process is a commitment to truth, and I began to feel
that I was not being truthful," he says. "The shame of drug addiction is
part of what makes it difficult for people to ask for help, and I felt that
I was perpetuating that stigma. If there is a message to the movie, I guess
it's that drugs should be a health care issue rather than a criminal issue."

He started, as young people often do, with alcohol and marijuana. "I
remember, when I was writing Traffic, talking to top federal
drug-enforcement officials and having them say they read it and found it
very good and believable, except the scene where the girl describes her
resume," he says. In that scene a private-school student, arrested for drug
possession, ticks off her academic and athletic achievements to a
disbelieving social worker.

"They said to me, 'There is no way this girl could be achieving at the
level you have her achieving at and be using cocaine,' " Gaghan says. "I
didn't tell them that the resume was my resume exactly, at a time when I
was drinking every day and smoking marijuana and taking cocaine."

The point, he says, is that drug addiction can attack anyone, even a
high-achieving private-school student from a solid middle-class family.
Many of Gaghan's school friends experimented with drugs, but for most of
them it was a brief affair. But for him, it became fascinating.

"It was always just a point of trying to take it a little bit further than
everybody else," he says. "You end up finding lower and lower companions.
People fall out, and you end up with people who are right on the edge of
criminals, people who can procure for you the various things you need."

He was thrown out of school but eventually got into a small business
college in Massachusetts. There he hooked up with some venture capitalists
and started a catalogue company, Fallen Empire Inc, hoping to earn enough
to support his writing career and to buy booze and drugs.

One of his stories, The Year With No Winter, was published in the Iowa
Review in 1990. But the business was a disaster. When he had lost
everyone's money, he simply ran away to New York: "I'd get in trouble in
one place, so I'd flee to someplace else."

Most of the time he was using drugs. He shifted steadily toward cocaine and
eventually the sniffable heroin that became popular in the early 1990s. "It
was just the thing to do," he says. "You'd walk around the East Village in
your hipster boots, listening to grunge music and being the prototypes of
heroin chic. It's so embarrassing."

By this time he was an addict, but he didn't know it: "I thought I was
having this literary adventure, that I was really fine." There were
seizures, bouts of incontinence, a steady descent into mental and physical
squalor. The amazing thing, he says, is that beyond his drug friends he was
able to keep it a secret. "I worked very hard on the mask. The one thing
that I couldn't disguise was that I was getting arrested all the time."

There were 20 or 30 arrests, mostly on minor charges. And then he made a
mistake. "I used to buy drugs from these 14-year-old kids who ran their
operation out of an apartment in Manhattan. I went over there one day in
late 1992. I had maybe $4 worth of heroin in my pocket, and I wanted to buy
a half-gram of cocaine."

He bought the cocaine and left the building, but was arrested around the
corner, caught in a police sting. This was no petty offence: this was
heroin and cocaine. But Gaghan borrowed from friends, used all his savings
and hired a good lawyer. He pleaded guilty to possession and was given a
conditional discharge. Then he acted the way he always did when backed into
a corner. He fled to Los Angeles.

It was 1993, and the worst was yet to come. He worked for a while answering
phones for a production company. Then he stalked off on his own, hoping to
make it as a movie writer. "I got 10,000 rejections," he says. He lived the
west Hollywood life of a struggling writer, getting odd jobs, up all night,
high or strung out.

"It starts out that you have a bunch of people around you, living the same
drug life, and then people start to drop off," Gaghan says. "They die. They
go into rehab. They disappear. Until finally you're down to a real
hardcore, the iron men. After a while they're gone, too. And it's just you,
locked in the bathroom. I honestly believe I spent three of the last 10
years locked in the bathroom."

There is a scene in Traffic in which Michael Douglas, playing the addict's
father, breaks into the bathroom where she has locked herself. It had to be
in the film, Gaghan says, because the bathroom was in his life.

By the mid-1990s, he began to get work. He had jobs on various movie lots,
wrote some television shows, even shared an Emmy. But he was a drug addict
the whole time. "I smoked crack in my office on the Universal lot, always
with some heroin to even it out," he says.

And then came the day, in July 1997, he hit the wall. A friend led him to
therapists, substance-abuse programmes and what he hopes will be a whole
new life. Gaghan declines to give the name of the person who saved his
life: it is a writer and actor, he says, who deserves his anonymity. He met
a woman in recovery named Michael McCraine, and now they have a 9-month-old
son, Gardner. It's been 43 months, he says, since he found the way out of
the drug life.

"I'm happy now. No one who saw me a few years ago could believe I would be
here. I don't know if drug addiction is genetic. I don't even know if it's
a disease. But I do know one thing: you have to treat it like a disease.
Because if you don't, you die."