'MOYERS ON ADDICTION' WORKS HARD TO GRAB AUDIENCE

Aside from congressional aides who have to summarize "Moyers on Addiction:
Close to Home" for their bosses, it's hard to imagine many people watching
all five hours of this series.

Not that it isn't well-done and thought-provoking. It'll probably win
executive editor and host Bill Moyers another Emmy Award, not to mention a
Columbia-duPont, an Edward R. Murrow and a Peabody. It's important
public-service journalism.

But if documentaries about sharks and gorillas attract relatively modest
audiences to PBS, what are the chances of a series that often feels like
homework?

Moyers understands the expectations of drama that come with the TV
territory. He frontloaded the series with intensely human moments. For the
first hour tonight, a rainbow coalition of recovering addicts talks about
how they started, how low they sank and how they stopped.

There's an elegant society mom whose drug of choice was white wine. At her
most hopeless, she says, "I remember thinking, 'I'm just going to raise
these children, and then I'll die.' "

A woman with prominent facial scars, the self-inflicted mementos of a booze
and crack binge, says, "I didn't want those things to happen. I didn't want
to cut myself. I didn't want to jump out of windows. I didn't want to end
up in places where I didn't know how I got there, with people I don't know
who they are. When I came out of my mama's womb, I didn't say, 'I want to
be a drunk. I want to be a tramp.' "

The soliloquies of degradation, sickness and redemption are undeniably
powerful. Still, after a while, they start to feel like an infomercial for
treatment centers.

Part 2, which also airs tonight, shows what a brain on drugs looks like --
and it's not the frying egg of that well-known public-service ad. Moyers
takes viewers to a hospital where scientists X-ray a cocaine user's head
while the drug works its way through her brain. You can actually see
physical changes as they occur. Other scans show how a drug can "hijack"
the brain, negating its natural ability to produce pleasure-inducing
biochemicals and thus giving the user one alternative: more of the drug.

In interviews, Moyers has been up front about his desire to see addiction
classified as a disease. He believes treatment works and that more people
would seek it if their insurance covered it.

He plays devil's advocate in raising the question of personal
accountability: "Does the fact that the brain has been hijacked. . .
relieve the addict of moral responsibility?"

Dr. Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health,
answers, "Success in getting people into treatment demands that you still
treat them as a moral agent." But that's not the same as if Moyers had
included a doctor or insurance company spokesman who disagrees with the
premise. There's another side to this issue, but what it is isn't clear
from Moyers' report.

Monday's third hour looks at different approaches to treatment. The fourth
hour, airing Tuesday, focuses on examples of the one in five American
children who live with an alcoholic or addicted person. The final hour,
also on Tuesday, examines our national "war" on drugs and what we're
getting for the $16 billion we spend annually. Among those interviewed are
Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and Rep. Jim Ramstad, R-Minn., both advocates
of insurance parity for addiction.

Each hour contains useful information, though not necessarily information
every viewer will want. Five hours of broadcast TV may not be the most
efficient way to deliver it.

If addiction interests you, consider taping the series so you can replay it
at your own pace. You might also send away for one of the viewers' guides
that New York's WNET is distributing. The guides target six groups: general
public, corporations, health professionals, families, elementary schools
and high schools. To get a free copy, indicate on a postcard which guide(s)
you would like and send it to Moyers on Addiction, P.O. Box 245, Little
Falls, NJ 07424--0245.

The guides also will be available online at http://www.pbs.org/closetohome
and http://www.wnet.org/closetohome

© Copyright 1998 Star Tribune.