TOP AUTHOR BARES DRUG DEMONS

AUTHOR Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose 1994 best-seller, "Prozac Nation," was
a wake-up call to an overmedicated generation, admits she's been
battling addiction to prescription drugs, cocaine, speed and heroin.

"Every morning, I make a new bargain with myself not to use drugs,"
Wurtzel writes in a cool but scary article in the September issue of
Glamour magazine. "The most intimate relationship I have ever had was
with white lines. With 40 [Ritalin] pills a day crushed up, and
cocaine cut up. I love it more than anything I have ever loved, and I
cannot have it."

It's a cautionary tale of the potential cost of fame and fortune at a
young age. Wurtzel says she spent four months in drug rehab at
Connecticut's Silver Hill Hospital, "a country club-ishsprawl that
famously treats deranged dowagers and literary drunks." That was two
years ago.

"And then, after I started using drugs again on the very day I checked
out (don't ask - it happens all the time), I ended up in a six-month
outpatient treatment program here in New York City. As I like to joke,
it has been more expensive to get off drugs than it ever was to use
them," she says.

She started her next best-seller, "Bitch," while fueled by drugs. "I
was introduced to heroin by a handsome guy who hid with me in the
bathroom during my 27th birthday," she says. "For the past two years,
I have been in recovery from drug addiction ... I spend an
uncomfortable number of hours each week in 12-step meetings drinking
bad black coffee."