<\/em> A&E’s ”Intervention" is the latest faux A promising premise. Self-destructive \n In the premiere, we meet two drug addicts, a cocaine freak named Tommy Sound like our kind of people! Junkies are definitely In real life, unfortunately, interventions are rarely Even when they are justified, motivated by real love and carried out by professionals, there is no guarentee of success. If a junkie has it bad, you can break both of their arms and tie them to a bed, and they will still figure out a way to sneak out and get high. Believe us, we’ve tried this.<\/p>\n We write from experience. Back in college, the Although we missed Harvard’s Golden Age of Psychedelic Bizarre, inexplicable events were de rigueur in those It seems that our friends and roommates could no longer Hmmm. It seems that our personal experiences contradict Intervention Review from the Intervention debuts Sunday night at 10 on A & E<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a dedicated blogger, we spend a lot more time reading about TV shows than actually watching them, Rarely are we even tempted to turn our attention away from the screen and towards the tube. However, when this review appeared … Continue reading ![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/innervension.jpg\")
As a dedicated blogger, we spend
\n a lot more time reading about TV shows than actually watching them, Rarely
\n are we even tempted to turn our attention away from the screen and towards
\n the tube. However, when this review appeared in the morning paper,
\n we were hooked.<\/p>\n\n
\n reality philanthropy, and it ranks as one of the rankest. On the surface,
\n it’s a benevolent
\n effort to reveal the power and beauty of interventions, which find
\n loved ones confronting an addict about his problem and instantly removing
\n him
\n to rehab. But underneath the charitable veneer, the show, which premieres
\n tomorrow, is about watching broken addicts destroy themselves. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n behavior is hypnotizing and quintessentially American.<\/p>\n\n
\n who has snorted away his fortune and Alyson the former White House
\n intern, whose many habits includes crack, heroin, pot, and morphine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n an underrepresented minority on network TV these days. Alyson, in particular,
\n sounds like a real piece of work. She "cleans her dope in her bedroom
\n in her parents’ home, fires up her bong, steals painkillers from her
\n dying father, and scores and smokes crack with a friend."<\/p>\n
\n completely successful. They can be motivated by the wrong reasons,
\n and miss the cause of the offending behavior completely. They are often
\n power plays by parents who have lost control of and contact with their
\n kids for reasons beyond their understanding or ability to fix. Don’t
\n forget, the methodology of Intervention was first popularized by families
\n trying
\n to pry their
\n kids from cults and out-of-the-mainstream religions, and to "cure" homosexuality.<\/p>\n
\n Dowbrigade was the recipient of an intervention organized by our
\n roommates and other friends who cared for us in a real way and wanted
\n to help us
\n overcome some very objectionable and worrisome behavior.<\/p>\n
\n Development, when Timothy Leary was wandering around Harvard Yard offering
\n $20 cash to anyone willing to troop down to William James Hall, drop
\n acid, and let a bunch of goofy grad students poke ’em and ask questions,
\n by the early 70’s there were more drugs on campus than there are now
\n in our junk email filter. We were basically guinea pigs
\n for the Harvard Chemistry Department, who were turning out new compounds
\n weekly, things with wild aconomytic names never heard of before, or since.
\n And that was before we joined the Anthropology Department, became an
\n Ethno-botanist, and started bringing even more exotic stuff back from
\n Amazon expeditions.<\/p>\n
\n days, so we were not overly surprised when four or five unseen voices
\n and twice that many hands grabbed us in a hall of Winthrop House late
\n one night, threw a sheet over our head, and hustled us into a nearby
\n dorm
\n room.
\n There,
\n after being pancaked between mattresses, berated in three languages and
\n lashed with a wet, psychedelic, paisley tie, we were told the reason
\n for the Intervention.<\/p>\n
\n stand by or stand at all our annoying habit of not returning LP’s to
\n their paper sleeves and cardboard covers! (for those of you born after
\n 1984,
\n LPs
\n were those big black petrochemical frisbees which were the dominant
\n format of recorded music before the CD – what our kids call "those big
\n old floppy disks") We would leave the actual 33 rpm records
\n strewn around the room, naked, vulnerable to scratches or stains, and
\n sometimes, distracted by real or imagined interventions inside our head,
\n we would wander off, our musical mess completely forgotten. Our friends
\n had had enough of this inexcusable behavior.<\/p>\n
\n our original point, and argue that interventions really do work. Now
\n that we think about it, it has been years since we’ve left a record out
\n of its paper sleeve or cardboard
\n cover.<\/p>\n
\n Boston Globe<\/a><\/p>\n