I Was Right About Lindsay, Maybe…

Lindsay’s own words in an upcoming Vanity Fair interview may prove me right.  Last week, in my second post on Lindsay Lohan, I wrote about the fact that doctors at her most recent treatment program have concluded that she was misdiagnosed, and that she had no physical dependence to alcohol.  Furthermore, I concluded that she had gone through a problematic phase of substance use which commonly starts in the late teens and ends in the mid-twenties.  I offered up evidence from Gene Heyman which documents this phase, the fact that more than half of “substance dependent” people resolve their problem by age 24, and that 75% of females resolve their problem between the ages of 18 and 29.

Most people who have these problems, have them when they are young, they also stop having these problems when they are young.  While the behavior she showed back in 2007 isn’t good behavior, or recommended or necessarily acceptable – it is to some degree, normal.  It is a phase, a well documented phase that many people go through.  It is no reason to give her a death sentence, or to assume that she’s destined for a lifetime of struggle with “the disease of addiction”.

Read last weeks full post here.

Note: In the above study, a female will be categorized in the Partial Remission or Asymptomatic categories if she drinks 4 or more drinks on any single occasion in the past year.  I know many women who may have 4 drinks once in a while, but I would not consider them anywhere near alcohol dependent. Bottom line, the results may be better than this graph actually shows.

Now Lindsay may or may not be lying, she may or may not be abusing substances, and as with any personal behavior, often nobody other than the person in question knows the full truth for sure.  I am not a psychic or a lie detector, so I don’t know for sure, but I do know one thing – it is not proper to simply assume that Lindsay is lying.

So now we get to the confirmation of my assessment of the situation.  The new issue of Vanity Fair, which hits the newsstands tomorrow features an interview with Lindsay, in which she says:

“I’ve never abused prescription drugs. I never have—never in my life. I have no desire to. That’s not who I am. I’ve admitted to the things that I’ve done—to, you know, dabbling in certain things and trying things ’cause I was young and curious and thought it was like, O.K., ’cause other people were doing it and other people put it in front of me. And I see what happened in my life because of it.”

The article also continues:

“it was very go-go-go and I had a lot of responsibility; and I think just the second I didn’t have [structure] anymore—I was 18, 19—with a ton of money and no one really here to tell me that I couldn’t do certain things … And I see where that’s gotten me now, and I don’t like it.” She says tabloids were her main source of news, and calls that “really scary and sad… I would look up to those girls… the Britneys and whatever. And I would be like, I want to be like that.”

So in her own words, she describes experimentation with a substance using lifestyle; and her own description of the situation actually gives the picture of a phase starting in the late teens and ending in the mid twenties – exactly what I said it was.  But why listen to Lindsay?  She’s an addict, and she’s lying.  It’s part of her disease.  She’s in denial.  Once an addict, always an addict.  And why listen to me?  I was once a substance abuser, so I’m probably lying, the research I cited probably doesn’t even exist!  Let’s listen to self-contradictory idiots like the one in the video I posted.