Reaction from his sponsors and the public have been mixed. And some international columnists have come on side and supported him as, “only human.”

An article in the Washington Post says we are “imposing monstrous expectations on our heroes.” Darn right. If they have the talent and determination to pursue a high profile athletic career and all the perks that go along with that, which are substantial, they better also have the character. It is not as if they are rock stars! They’re athletes for heaven’s sake.

If he wants to smoke and drink and make merry he best be looking over his very sizable shoulder for photo happy partiers.

Phelps has an obligation to young people (not to mention his sponsors) and a reputation to maintain.  His message should be, “It’s not OK to smoke anything.”

Chances are many youth will smoke marijuana anyway. About 42 per cent of Americans have tried it at least once. But that is no reason to promote it. Phelps has apologized publicly and said he made a mistake. That should be the end of the story.

But it’s not.

Olympic snowboarding champion, Ross Rebagliati, who himself got caught smoking marijuana, has said we should give Phelps a break. Rebagliati didn’t stop there, “I personally think it is safer than alcohol and cigarettes.” Huh! Briliant.

Maybe these role-model athletes should take a look at the big picture and strut clear headedness instead of mind altering substances.

It is common knowledge that first year university is all about partying which is all about drinking, smoking weed and often ingesting other drugs like ecstasy. For a respected athlete to indicate to the world that marijuana is OK is not OK.

All of the above alter the consciousness, lower inhibitions and can lead to excess. The whole territory is a minefield for our young people, a fatal minefield.

Recent figures out of Britain indicate that one in five youth under 16 get drunk several nights a week and that heaving drinking is increasing in the middle class: one in three men and one in five women drink at hazardous levels.

Chief medical officer of the U.K., Sir Liam Donaldson, has just come out with a five-point plan for an alcohol free childhood. He says it is important for parents to establish the norm that childhood and adolescence should be alcohol-free: make clear that drink parties, clandestine drinking, getting drunk (and taking drugs) are not acceptable.

Maybe Michael Phelps, Ross Rebagliati and cohorts should take a gander at his report and thier own obligations.

Carrie Fisher at 19: Princess Leia

Wishful Drinking is a short, witty and telling autobiography. Fisher has said that the only way she can deal with her bizarre stories is with humour. Fisher was born into Hollywood royalty and knows she should not feel hard done by. Her parents were the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt of their day (and Elizabeth Taylor was the Angelina Jolie).

Under the guise of trying to remember her life after her recent electroshock therapy Fisher hops through her eventful life with self-deprecating candor and hilarity.

“As a child I thought that Father Knows Best was real and my life was fake. Not that I have ever had much use for reality – having spent much of what I laughingly refer to as my adult life attempting to escape it with the assistance of a variety of drugs.”

Her drug use started at 13 years old with marijuana. Six years later that stopped working for her and she moved onto hallucinogens and painkillers. Her mother became worried and “did what any mother would do. She called Cary Grant.” He apparently did LSD under “doctor’s supervision.”

In trying to get to the bottom of all her struggles Fisher had various diagnosis. She writes that it is useless to diagnose someone with a mood disorder “who is engaged in ingesting large quantities of drugs or alcohol – which I was – because drug addiction and alcoholism, done properly of course, classically mimics the symptoms of manic-depression: sexual promiscuity, excessive spending, and substance abuse.”

Fisher writes that once “I stopped the substances that I used to distort and mask my symptoms, it was now all too clear that I was a bona-fide, wild ride manic-depressive.”

Wishful Drinking is a quick read, entertaining and enlightening. Fisher makes no excuses and in the process sends a message for those prepared to receive it. She makes it very clear that Alcoholics Anonymous has helped her. Her story is laced with references to this twelve-step, self-help group from which she says she has found some wisdom.

Fisher makes direct references that are straight from the AA program such as, “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” and that, “Many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell.” Fisher continued from that thought:

“And while the place I have arrived in my life may not precisely be everyone’s idea of heavenly, I could swear sometimes – if I am quiet enough – I can hear the angels singing…

Either that or I’ve screwed up my medication.”

Eventually he found himself living the life that Jonathan was living when he was dying; isolated, racked with chronic pain and addicted to prescription drugs. As the result of an intervention Dr. Davis was forced to quit. Then he was forced to grieve. His self-destruction was all about burying profoundly powerful sadness that he had not been ready to face.

Dr. Davis got well, became a nationally renowned addiction medical expert and wrote a book about it, claimed by The New York Times Book Review to be “an eye-opening look into the hidden world of America’s drug problem.”

Living Jonathan’s Life: A Doctor’s Descent into Darkness and Addiction looks like a tender and dramatic read. It is also a valuable resource. What Dr. Davis makes perfectly clear is this: in order to recover from substance addiction (alcohol, street drugs or pills) one simply must face feelings, live feelings, embrace feelings… actually feel feelings.

I have not had a chance to finish reading Living Jonathan’s Life but it has already helped me. I too lost what felt like my other half. I too could not handle it. I too self-destructed. I too got better. I too faced and continue to face and feel my feelings full on, as best I can. I too want to help people addicted to substances, but I will not be able to reach people the way Dr. Scott Davis does.

He: is the only full-time addiction medicine physician at the Betty Ford Treatment Centre; developed a nationally accepted model for treating opiate addicts; acts as a consultant for institutions such as the US Justice Department and Centre for Subtance Abuse; and has written this eloquent and heart wrenching book.

In Living Jonathan’s Life

Dr. Davis has exposed the skeletons in his closet, let the demons out for all to see and having done that, he has granted permission to others to do the same. It does help for people suffering from addiction issues to witness the descent into darkness and recovery of someone as well respected as Dr. Scott M. Davis.

The last half of the book is an appendix of resources including: a glossary of alcohol, addiction and treatment centre/rehab terms; an extensive list of US treatment centres; types of intervention; a self-assessment questionnaire and the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

You can find it in the Addiction and Recovery section of the book store.

Art imitates life.

Life imitates art.

Tom Wolfe is a best selling American author and journalist who has penned at least a dozen books including The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The last two fall into the category of New Journalism which is stylistically written accounts of true events.

Wolfe and Truman Capote were two of the pioneers of the genre. Capote gave the movement substance with the 1965 release of In Cold Blood about the murder of a Texas family. He said, prophetically, that journalism was the “least explored of literary mediums.”

The New Journalism genre not only flourished, it was the launching pad for yet another literary genre: New New Journalism.

In New New Journalism the author is no longer a mere observer. The author is a participant in the story being told. This has also been labelled immersion journalism, personal journalism, hanging out journalism and drowning journalism. For example, Ted Conover became a prison guard for a year and then wrote the novel, Newjack.

The New New Journalism is the memoir run amuck.

Some authors, such as James Frey, test the limits of both genres. He got caught red handed, not only exaggerating, but lying about his six months in rehab in A Million Little Pieces, which nonetheless was a gripping read.

Which brings me to my original point. Frey did not orchestrate his drug addiction and rehab experience in order to write a best seller. However, could this type of motivation develop?

There have been a splurge of memoirs about drunks and addicts, and their shocking journeys through death-defying debauchery and recovery.

Augusten Burroughs catapulted to literary stardom with Running With Scissors,

about his horrifying childhood. More recently he wrote the darkly comic Dry, about his struggles with alcoholism.

Heather King’s Parched is an eloquent documentation of King’s alcoholic prison and subsequent liberation. As a critic says, "her journey towards redemption is both appalling and hilarious."

Smashed by Koren Zailckas, yet another best seller, details the author’s battle with the bottle. Zailckas explores the phenomenon which is teenage binge drinking.

In my last blog I reviewed Tweak by Nic Sheff, which chronicles his drug addiction that started in his early teens.

Herein lies my concern. Are there dangerous precedents here?

It is an accepted literary journalism form to put oneself in a situation and write about it.

It is also an accepted literary form to write a memoir.

Could people, especially young people, be fooled into thinking it is sane to pursue a perilous life of drinking and drugging in order to conduct research for a blockbuster best seller? A career launching thesis!

Do we need to take a sober look at this trend? We are lauding the literary skills and lives of people who have cheated death without addressing the brutal truth: not everybody is fortunate enough to have only flirted with death on the destructive detour through alcoholism and drug addiction. People, lots of people, die on that road.

As I said, I feel a dangerous movement afoot.

Art imitates life.

Life imitates art.

At the end of my last blog entry I wondered if Sheff, author of Tweak, Growing Up On Methamphetamines was still sober. I found out he did relapse "just on pills and marijuana," which definitely is not cool, but he is sober now with a blog, which he has stopped writing, and a MySpace page.

But that is not the reason he is so cool and all those other things I said, although he has a pretty funky MySpace page. And he has written what looks to be an intriguing book, which also is not the reason he is so cool and all those other things I said.

I should mention that Tweak is about Sheff’s "struggles with addiction – specifically IV crystal meth and, uh, coke and heroin and crack and all sorts of pills and ecstacy and hallucinogens and pot and alcohol and I guess just about everything," as he wrote in the Second Afterword of the book.

My admiration kicks in when I read what he has included at the end of the book: the two Afterwords, the reading book guide for Tweak, and a list of resources for young people struggling with alcohol and drugs.

Sheff is telling young people how "not to" do it. And he is cool enough and smart enough and interesting enough that young people will pay attention.

In the Afterwords he reveals how brutally honest he has been and admits that scared him. He was scared because he had exposed his doubts, fears and insecurities. Then Sheff says that he realized he was not unique after reading books by authors who "fearlessly examined and exposed their highly imperfect inner lives."

He mentioned Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Try by Dennis Cooper: "They gave me permission to start accepting my flaws, my darkness, my insanity."

By being starkly honest about "the pain and vacancy" he has had inside of him his entire life he is giving others permission to face their realities too. Sheff’s "others" are teens and young adults.

What’s more is Sheff gives practical direction too. The very back page lists resources such as Alateen and the National Institute on Drug Abuse for Teens.

There is even a Reading Book Guide for Tweak complete with discussion questions and activities obviously aimed at youth. It ends with an Internet address for Check Yourself: A place for teens to check where they are with drugs and alcochol.

I couldn’t say it better than the London Daily Mail which is quoted on the front flap of the book: Tweak and Beautiful Boy (by Nic’s dad, David Sheff) should be, "mandatory reading for every teenager and every parent of one."

That was 2003. Today my children do not have those kinds of real problems. I say that with heartfelt gratitude.

A couple in the group had a daughter addicted to crystal meth. The daughter did get clean and became a poster child for Alcoholics Anonymous, visiting high schools and giving talks and the like. Many recovering drug addicts attend AA instead of, or as well as, Narcotics Anonymous . AA is more established and both programs live by the same basic principles: the 12 steps.

The daughter has since "gone out". She ended up on the Downtown East Side. ‘Last I heard she was in jail and her parents had to make the brutal decision to not bail her out. Their daughter was safe and sober.

I do not purport to be an expert on crystal meth but I know it is cheap and available . And deadly addictive.

Journalist David Sheff is a parent who has become an expert on crystal meth. He brilliantly tells his story of the horrors of crystal meth, and living with a child addicted to it, in Beautiful Boy , A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction (Houghton Mifflin).

The reader grows fond of young Nic Sheff and goes on the journey with his father through the darkness that is – a child addicted. It is also a journey of knowledge, about the drug, the professional help available, and about what parents can, and can’t, do. We agonize with David Sheff as he learns how to stop enabling the addict.

I do know something about the disease of addiction and the havoc in wreaks in families. And Sheff is right on.

Sheff also battles with the question plaguing any parent in his circumstances, why? "What did I do wrong as a parent?" He wonders if it had been unwise to tell Nic about his own drug use. But that leads the reader wanting to know details.

I wanted to see if Nic was sober today and discovered he had written his own book, Tweak : Growing up on Methamphetamines (Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing).  Tweaking, I believe, means picking at your face, a habit of meth users who think bugs are crawling under their skin.

I also stumbled upon U.S. News and World Report video clips of David and Nic Scheff. Nic has become a journalist as well and has been published in Newsweek.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Nic is still clean and sober. If you know, please comment below. In the meantime, I’ll add him to my prayers.

This is good news for me as I am about two thirds of the way through my autobiography under the professional mentorship of Betsy Warland, the director of The Writer’s Studio at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.

There seems to be a possibility that I could finish my book before books become obsolete. More good news is that some of my subject matter seems to be quite in vogue now, thanks to James Frey and A Million Little Pieces (Anchor Books, Random House). His wildly successful and wildly exaggerated A Million Little Pieces seemed to have whet an appetite for personal memoirs related to alcoholism and addiction, issues that have also stung my life.

As I am a journalist I am sensitive to, and curious about, Frey’s lackadaisical approach to the facts and am drawn to two more recent publications written by journalists; Beautiful Boy (Houghton Mifflin) by David Sheff, and David Carr’s The Night of the Gun, A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life, His Own (Simon and Schuster).

As Frey discovered, one of the problems about memoirs is the memory part, especially if the one writing the story is trying to remember times already clouded by drugs and alcohol.

As David Carr says, “We tell the world the part of our selves we want to show.” I will take that a step further and say that we often only remember the part of our selves we want to show the world. As Carr discovers while researching his book, he thought that on the night in question (of the gun) his buddy was the one with the gun. On further journalistic investigation he discovered that Carr himself was the one with the gun.

David Carr is one of those writers whose choreography of the English language is stunning. If for no other reason than that, I highly recommend it. I have not finished The Night of the Gun and am so far disappointed that Carr seems to be offering no explanation as to why he went so far off the rails: you know, the stuff about the dysfunction, normally alcohol related, of the family of origin.

So far, it is a well written series of misadventures and catastrophes with no insight into its antecedents. I would like to hear from readers, who have finished The Night of the Gun, if I can look forward to more profound analysis.

Meanwhile you can look forward to, in my blog, a review of the 2008 bestseller Beautiful Boy and musings about where all this fits into new journalism and new new journalism .