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Advocate of Moderation for Heavy Drinkers Learns Sobering
Lesson
Now Ms. Kishline says she may well become a spokeswoman again,
probably from behind prison bars.
Having pleaded guilty to two counts of vehicular homicide after
a binge drinking episode last March during which she became so
intoxicated she barely remembers climbing into her pickup truck,
Ms. Kishline said through her lawyer that she has a new message:
Moderation Management involves a lot of ''alcoholics covering up
their problem.''
Ms. Kishline, 43, was driving the wrong way down an interstate
freeway near Cle Elum, in central Washington, and smashed head-on
into a car, killing Danny Davis, a 38-year-old electrician, and
his 12-year-old daughter, LaSchell. Prosecutors said her
blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit.
With her plea last week, Ms. Kishline, who is in a treatment
program in Oregon, is almost certainly headed to prison when she
is sentenced on Aug. 11. The prosecutor is seeking four and a half
years, although the maximum penalty is life.
Ms. Kishline declined a request for an interview, but in a
statement she made with her lawyer at the Kittitas County
Courthouse, she expressed profound remorse and described herself
as ''a housewife and mother who woke up in a trauma unit of a
hospital on March 25th to find out that I am the cause of the
deaths of two innocent people.''
She added: ''I am giving this statement in a public forum
because I pray that my story can touch at least one other
alcoholic. When I failed at moderation, and then failed at
abstinence, I was too full of embarrassment and shame to seek
help. In self-pity I gave up and believed my nightly drinking at
home could hurt no one but myself.''
Controversial through all the years that she wrote newspaper
opinion-page pieces and appeared on television talk shows, Ms.
Kishline has again inflamed a debate over moderation versus
abstinence by offering her own calamitous story as an example of
denial in action. And many of those who debated her in the past
have seized on her experience to warn about what they call the
delusion behind the idea that alcoholics can be taught to drink
without harm.
''This dreadful tragedy might have been avoided if Ms. Kishline
had come to this realization earlier,'' said Stacia Murphy,
president of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug
Dependence, a nonprofit group based in New York City.
''Unfortunately, the disease of alcoholism, which is characterized
by denial, prevented this from occurring. While this does not
excuse Ms. Kishline's actions, it provides a harsh lesson for all
of society.''
But far from depicting Ms. Kishline as an example of the
failures of Moderation Management, people involved with the
organization note that she had also tried abstinence and failed.
And the worst incident occurred, in her own depiction, after she
had joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
''Isn't it ironic that her most extreme case of intoxication
came after she quit Moderation Management?'' said Stanton Peele, a
board member of Moderation Management who is a psychologist in
Morristown, N.J. ''A.A. didn't have the answers for her, either.''
Indeed, despite Ms. Kishline's troubles,
the concept of Moderation Management was recently accepted as a
treatment technique by the Smithers Addiction Treatment and
Research Center in Manhattan.
Officials at Smithers, known for its treatment of
celebrities like the baseball player Darryl Strawberry, have
decided to adopt Ms. Kishline's program as one approach.
The willingness to try something new has been prompted, in
part, by stricter managed care reimbursement standards, which have
led to the closure of half of the nation's rehabilitation centers,
say officials at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, which runs
Smithers.
Ms. Kishline founded Moderation Management in 1993 and
published her book, subtitled ''The Moderation Management Guide
for People Who Want to Reduce Their Drinking,'' a year later. An
advertisement for the book said: ''Based on her own unsatisfactory
experience with abstinence-based programs, Kishline offers
inspiration and a step-by-step program to help individuals avoid
the kind of drinking that detrimentally affects their lives.''
Her program calls for 30 days of abstinence, and suggests
refraining from drinking for at least three days a week. Over all,
she wrote, women should not have more than three drinks a day or
exceed nine drinks a week; men, she said, should have no more than
four drinks a day or 14 drinks a week. Among tips to reduce
drinking are alternating alcoholic with nonalcoholic drinks.
Moderation Management, with chapters in 14 states and Canada,
describes its aim as helping people who have experienced mild to
moderate alcohol problems, but who are not alcoholics, reduce
their drinking. The group says moderate drinking is a ''reasonable
and attainable recovery goal for problem drinkers.''
Among the group's tenets are: ''Never drive while under the
influence of alcohol.''
Alcohol treatment experts have clashed over the moderation
approach, with some calling it useful for some kinds of drinkers,
while others say it gives alcoholics the false and dangerous hope
that they can learn ways to continue drinking.
The group got national attention two years ago when a computer
programmer confessed in an Internet chat site for group members
that he had killed his 5-year-old daughter by setting his house on
fire in a custody dispute with his former wife.
Ms. Kishline cried in court as she pleaded guilty to the
vehicular homicide charges. She had also been accused of
hit-and-run driving for forcing another vehicle off the highway,
but that charge was dropped.
Now she is contemplating writing another book, stressing that
moderation is not a viable option for people with serious alcohol
problems, said her lawyer, John Crowley.
During the proceeding, grieving relatives of Mr. Davis and his
daughter watched, clutching pictures of Mr. Davis and LaSchell,
who was killed 10 days after her 12th birthday. And they listened
carefully to Ms. Kishline's statement afterward.
''If it helps one person to stop, then go ahead, do it,'' Will
Davis, Mr. Davis's brother, said of Ms. Kishline's new message.
''But no matter what she does now, it's not bringing Danny
back,'' said another relative, standing nearby. ''It's not
bringing LaSchell back.'' [END]
Dr. DeLuca's Addiction, Pain, & Public Health website - Originally posted: 1/23/2003.