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Well, here we are in 2008, and it's time to reflect on the year gone by. What's the first thing we recall from 2007? The war in Iraq? The mid-west floods? The California wild-fires? Al Gore's global-warming peace prize?
For many Americans what pops into mind first and foremost are the strangely-fascinating excesses of the year's celebrity bad girls and their insatiable appetites for alcohol, illicit drugs, arrests and DUIs, jail time and trips to drug rehab.
2007 was definitely the year that the girls gone wild made drug rehab a household word. Not that they all wound up in rehab: Of the Hollywood girls gone wild - Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Britney Spears - Paris and Nicole managed to avoid it. They only had to go to jail.
The UK's wild-child, blues singer Amy Winehouse, who had a major hit about refusing to go to rehab, nevertheless spent a month in drug rehab last summer. But according to friends and family she's going to go back into treatment sometime soon. Judging from media reports, it can't be soon enough.
It's a wonder some of these ladies managed to survive at all, never mind save what's left of their careers. Endlessly partying like sailors on shore leave and logging arrests for DUI and possession of drugs, they were either in or out of rehab or jail so many times it set our heads spinning.
Thanks to relentless paparazzi, we had plenty of creepily entertaining shots of drugged, drunken, bleary-eyed, carousing, panty-less, filthy rich young women bent on self-destruction. But while we're watching this destruction on TV and reading about it in magazines and tabloids, we might want to keep something else in mind: One in five Americans has, is, or soon will be in trouble with alcohol or some type of drug.
As there are no paparazzi recording it for the media, we tend to miss it. And these millions of addicted Americans don't have personal managers or studio moguls to back them up, millions of fans offering unqualified support, or mega-bucks to cover months of drug rehab in some sexy Malibu drug rehab center.
Fortunately, while alcohol and drug addiction and personal self-destruction are happening all around us, so is rehab. There is an alcohol or drug rehab program in almost every town and city in America. And every day, addicted people beat their addictions and get their lives back.
This year, let's put our attention on what's happening at home and in our own neighborhoods. If it's not you or your wife, husband or kid, there will be someone next door or at work who needs help with alcohol or drug addiction or abuse. In 2008, do what you can to help them find the drug rehab program they need to recover their life.
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