An Intervention for Malibu
MALIBU, CALIF. — Cliffside, Summit, Milestones, Seasons. The names suggest New Age spas or, perhaps, recent-vintage vineyards. They sprawl across the scrubby foothills of this storied coastal town and survey its expensive, eroding beaches, their comforts rivaling those of world-class resorts.
They promote their privacy and exclusivity even as they bask in the reflected glory of their celebrated patrons. (Anyone who passed a newsstand last month knows that Lindsay Lohan spent her summer vacation at Cliffside.) And they’re spreading. As of July, there were 35 state-licensed drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities in this city (population 12,645), in addition to a multiplying number of unlicensed sober-living homes.
Question: What are Malibu’s only growth industries? Answer: Winemaking and sobriety. The locals may have a sense of humor about the situation, but that doesn’t mean they are happy with it. They fret that the playground of the rich and famous is turning into the capital of detox for the rich and famous. “The rehabs are overwhelming our neighborhoods,” Lou La Monte, a Malibu city councilman, recently said. “We have safety issues, noise issues, traffic issues. We’re going to take our city back.”
The largest and most expensive treatment center here is called Passages, which sits on a bluff across the Pacific Coast Highway from the ocean in the Sycamore Park neighborhood. Passages’ 35 clients live in several palatial residences scattered across a 10-acre campus that includes two pools overlooking the ocean, a tennis court and a glass-enclosed gym. Guests receive “integrative holistic treatment” that eschews traditional 12-step recovery methods in favor of such ministrations as hypnosis, life-purpose counseling and sound therapy. Marc Jacobs was a Passages client, as was Mel Gibson. Treatment starts at $64,000 a month.
In April, Rey Cano, a real estate appraiser who lives in Sycamore Park, appeared at a biweekly meeting of the Malibu City Council to report that he had recently come home in the middle of the day and found a naked Passages client wandering in front of his house. (He gave the man a blanket and called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to pick him up.) Mr. Cano said he was thankful the incident had occurred during the day, when his young daughter was at school, and urged the council to hold Malibu’s treatment centers to stricter standards for the sake of community safety.
That was not the first local incident involving a menacing patient. A few years ago, a resident at a Trancas Canyon facility set fire to a structure and threatened to ignite the neighborhood before being apprehended by sheriff’s deputies. A knife-wielding employee (and former patient) of another treatment center held up a pharmacy in the Point Dume area.
A month after Mr. Cano’s appearance before the City Council, Christi Hogin, Malibu city attorney, sent a letter to the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs asking the agency to revoke three of Passages’ operating licenses. The city’s official objection: Passages has exceeded its bed count by putting up some patients in guesthouses and a pool house rather than in discrete residences, as required by law. (A Passages representative did not return calls for comment.)
City leaders have pledged to improve the accountability of all of the treatment centers. In August, they met with state representatives to air issues ranging from code violations to the facilities’ tendency to cluster, or take over multiple homes in residential neighborhoods. “These mega-facilities are buying up three and four properties and creating compounds that are changing the nature of Malibu’s neighborhoods,” Ms. Hogin said. “They’re becoming hospital zones.”
The objections of homeowners who find themselves in these zones include noise and allegations that they’re being driven out of their own communities. Large or small, the grievances have a distinctly local flavor. “There’s nothing quite like having the paparazzi descend on your neighborhood,” said Scott Tallal, an entrepreneur who lives down the street from a now-defunct rehab facility in Trancas Canyon. “You can’t even get in and out of the neighborhood because they block the road with these huge black S.U.V.’s.”
Even critics like Councilman La Monte admit to the rush of pulling up to a stoplight and spotting Ben Affleck and Robert Downey Jr. in a single shuttle van from a rehab center. But celebrities who make repeated visits to Malibu to rehabilitate their images as much as their behavior are less warmly received, except by the tabloid photographers, who are also known to employ doorless helicopters and offshore speedboats for better access.
Ms. Lohan’s recent court-ordered stint at Cliffside, a whitewashed Cape Cod-style facility overlooking the Pacific, was her sixth such effort: TMZ had LiLo checking in (skull cap, aviator shades, poofy lips) and was there when she was checking out (strawberry blond hair extensions, aviator shades, less poofy lips).
Blame the Malibu Model for it all. Fifteen years ago, Richard Rogg, a real estate developer who turned to treating substance abuse after kicking a cocaine habit, opened Malibu’s first drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. From the beginning, Promises Malibu, originally housed in two rambling Mediterranean-style residences in the Big Rock area, was meant to serve as an alternative to hard-line traditional programs. Promises offered customized care — drawing on psychotherapy and holistic practices like yoga, meditation, and biofeedback — in vacationland surroundings. Mr. Rogg registered Malibu Model as a service mark for his treatment plan.
Lots of high-octane substance abusers embraced this model. That van containing Mr. Affleck, Mr. Downey and Charlie Sheen belonged to Promises. Britney Spears and Diana Ross are graduates. Promises grew: there are now five houses (and three pools) accommodating 24 rehab patients. Their daily regimen revolves around a therapy session (group or individual) in the morning and two in the afternoon. These are broken up by meals prepared by a chef (specialties include lobster tail and osso bucco) and complemented by optional activities like massage, tennis lessons and equine therapy. There are also excursions to A.A. meetings, a local gym and a beauty salon.
The Malibu Model proved to be a highly marketable paradigm. A surge in prescription drug use, along with a 2000 state statute promoting treatment rather than jail time for drug offenders and lax state licensing procedures, fueled a sharp increase in residential rehab centers. Nowhere was the growth more significant than in Malibu, whose setting and high-profile inhabitants, detoxifying or not, provided free advertising for the programs. By 2007, there were two dozen treatment centers in the city.
“Why Malibu? Because they can charge the big prices here,” Mayor Joan House said. While 85 percent of drug and alcohol treatment programs in the United States are nonprofit ventures, the luxury facilities in Malibu are commercial operations. Room tabs at the better-known centers make the Four Seasons look like a discount chain: rates start at around $60,000 a month and can exceed $100,000 a month for V.I.P. accommodations like private rooms or pet boarding. (By comparison, Hazelden, the 64-year-old treatment center network founded in Minnesota, charges as much as $32,000 a month.)
It’s a competitive market, trading in luxe amenities, esoteric-sounding treatment modalities and household-name graduates. Passages has marble bathrooms, biochemical repair supplements and David Hasselhoff. SOBA offers beach cottages, wellness coaches and Daniel Baldwin. Cliffside has turndown service, orthomolecular therapy and Chaka Khan.
Graduates of Malibu treatment programs who don’t have “sobriety coaches” on their payroll, or who find themselves otherwise ill prepared to re-enter the real world, can check in to one of the many sober-living homes in the area. These group homes, in which residents live under supervision without receiving treatment, are not licensed by the state and impossible to track, but they are proliferating by all accounts. The actor Matthew Perry, a Promises alumnus, recently opened Perry House, a seven-bed men’s facility in his former beach house, an ultramodern glass box in Serra Retreat that offers ocean views, a surround-sound theater and a lap pool with a flat-screen TV overhead.
Neither the sober-living homes nor the rehabilitation centers are licensed medical facilities. In the past, this has not stopped a number of Malibu rehab businesses from advertising in-house physicians or offering medical services, like dispensing drugs, for which they’ve been cited by state regulators. (The facilities can have physicians on staff, but they are only allowed to perform nonmedical procedures like monitoring a detox.)
The Malibu programs have also been criticized for inflating success rates. Passages says it has a 70 percent “cure rate,” and the Cliffside founder Richard Taite recently asserted on the NBC show “Today” that “90 percent of clients who complete treatment stay sober.” According to John Kelly, director of the Addiction Recovery Management Service at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, such statements are “just snake oil salesmanship.” He added, “There aren’t hard figures, but on average probably about a third of residential program inpatients are in remission one year after intervention.”
How do the high-end facilities and their patented mind/body/soul regimens stack up against bare-bones programs? “There’s absolutely no evidence to suggest they’re more successful,” said Richard Rawson, associate director of Integrated Substance Abuse Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There’s nothing wrong with having fun things for patients to do, but to call yoga or surfing evidence-based therapy is ludicrous.”
The actor Ryan O’Neal, a 42-year resident of La Costa Beach whose family’s struggles with substance abuse have been tabloid hay, would agree. “We never had any luck with Malibu,” he said. “The Malibu places are basically for the parents to get away from their children.”
Jeff Wald is a talent manager in Hollywood who got clean 27 years ago at the no-frills Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where rooms are shared, there are daily chores and visitors and offsite activities are taboo. He says there is something wrong with providing fun for patients. “If you’re living the way you lived before you went in, with your inflated sense of your own importance, what’s the lesson you learn?” he said. “These places that are like the Ritz serve no purpose whatsoever.”
Proponents of the facilities maintain that creature comforts and a sense of exclusivity are the carrots they must dangle to entice their clientele. “The Malibu Model says people who don’t complete treatment don’t get better,” said Dr. David Sack, chief executive of Promises. “We see people who are highly successful individuals. If they’re not in a comfortable environment, they’re not going to stay long enough to benefit from treatment.”
The rehab centers have their defenders among Malibu residents as well. From May Rindge (who owned the rancho that became the city and in the early 1900s tried to stop the state from running the Pacific Coast Highway through her property) to David Geffen (who fought for years to keep the public off his beach), the area has been home to some of the most famous nimbys in the world. Some locals believe much of the hostility toward the facilities stems from a similar impulse. “As liberal as this town is, everybody is looking out for number one,” said Karen Farrer, a longtime resident of Point Dume.
For some time, in fact, those who can afford to be adversaries of the rehab centers have been taking matters into their own hands. One couple who lived down the street from Promises Malibu and watched it snap up home after home in the neighborhood took the facility to court three times, for issues like disturbing the peace, before leasing their house to Promises. (The plaintiffs, who moved to Zuma Beach, signed a confidentiality agreement.) In Broad Beach, neighbors of a treatment center and a sober-living home are suing their respective operators over traffic and noise issues.
Malibu officials expect that such lone efforts will become less common. This month, they are reconvening in Sacramento with officials from other rehab-facility-dense communities in the state to consider legislation requiring treatment centers to be more thinly distributed. They’re hoping their sheer numbers will help sway state regulators. “Reseda and Long Beach and Riverside have exactly the same problems,” Councilman La Monte said. “This isn’t some whiny Malibu issue.”
Chances are good, however, that doorless helicopters will remain a problem particular to Malibu. And that, whatever happens, the paparazzi will endure, ambushing their subjects outside Seasons as well as Starbucks. Will LiLo rejoin the quarry? Inquiring minds want to know.
