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[NIDA's Addiction Performance Project---What's It All About?]
[Performance: Mary Tyrone] What did the man say?
Not that it matters as long as he filled the prescription.
[Cathleen] It mattered to me then. I'm not used to being treated like a thief.
He gave me a long look and said insultingly, "Where did you get a hold of this?"
And I says, "It's none of your damn business,
but if you must know it's for the lady I work for, Mrs. Tyrone, who's sitting out in the automobile."
That shut him up quick.
He gave a look out at you and says, "Oh." And then went to get the medicine.
[Mary Tyrone] Yes, he knows me. Well, it's a special kind of medicine.
I have to take it because there is no other that can stop the pain. All the pain. In my hands, I mean.
[BRYAN DOERRIES] OK, here's a very dark subject, here's a really nasty case study about addiction disorder.
Now, what are we going to do about it?
How much has changed in the last hundred years?
What have we learned scientifically that will enable and empower physicians of every rank,
and other caregivers, to do right by these patients?
How do we protect ourselves and our patients from the moral judgment and the stigma attached with addiction?
[Performance: Mary Tyrone] I know you still love me James, in spite of everything.
[James Tyron] Yes, as God as my judge, always in forever Mary.
[Mary Tyrone] And I love you, dear, in spite of everything.
But I must confess, James, although I couldn't help loving you,
I would never have married you if I'd known you drank so much.
I remember the first night when your barroom friends had to help you up to the door of our hotel room
and then knocked and ran away before I came to the door.
We were still on our honeymoon. Do you remember?
James Tyrone: No I don't remember and it wasn't on our honeymoon.
And I've never in my life had to be helped to bed or miss a performance.
[BLYTHE DANNER] And there's still a great love, but there's this sort of going for the jugular
and acting out because there was no way of treating, at least there wasn't for this family, and very little in general.
I think there was just - no one knew what to do.
So whatever the drug or the alcohol even would lead them to do, they would just act out, you know.
But there was an awful lot of recrimination and blame.
[Performance: Mary Tyrone] I wanted to treat Cathleen because I had her drive uptown with me
and I sent her in to get my prescription filled.
[Edmund Tyrone] For God's sake, Mama. You can't trust her. Do you want everyone on earth to know?
[Mary Tyrone] Know what? That I suffer from rheumatism in my hands and have to take medicine to kill the pain.
Why should I be ashamed of that?
I never knew what rheumatism was before you were born. Ask your father.
[James Tyrone] Don't mind her lad, she doesn't mean anything.
When she gets to the stage when she gives the old crazy excuse about her hands she's gone far away from us.
[Mary Tyrone] Well, I'm glad you realize that, James.
Now perhaps you'll give up trying to remind me.
[HARRIS YULIN] Well, everybody's at the mercy of the addict. You know?
Or everybody's at the mercy of the alcoholic.
You know, the sickest person usually gets all the attention.
And so the whole family revolves around that.
At this particular time, the whole family is revolving around Mary - Mother's - drug addiction.
And that dictates everything that happens in the play.
[Performance: Edmund Tyrone] Yes, I hear you Mama. I wish to God I didn't.
It's pretty hard to take at times having a dope fiend for a mother.
[Mary Tyrone: crying]
[DR. NORA VOLKOW] What we're trying to do with the Addiction Performance Project
is to be able to engage the public with a recognition at an emotional level of what it is to be addicted,
the suffering for the person and the suffering that that person creates on those that he or she loves.
So it's a way of creating that - for a short period of time,
to be able to immerse the person of what it must be to be addicted
or to be in a family where someone is addicted - what does it feel like.
[Credits: BLYTHE DANNER(Mary Tyrone), HARRIS YULIN (James Tyrone), BRYCE PINKHAM ( Edmund Tyrone), and SARA WAISANEN (Cathleen)]
[National Institute on Drug Abuse, http://www.drugabuse.gov, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Health and Human Services]