I wrote the following this morning, then turned on the news to learn Trump had declared war on opioid abuse. He promises new programs, but, withholds any new funding.

“In ringing and personal terms, President Donald Trump on Thursday pledged that “we will overcome addiction in America,” declaring opioid abuse a national public health emergency and announcing new steps to combat what he described as the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. Trump’s declaration, which will be effective for 90 days and can be renewed, will allow the government to redirect resources in various ways and to expand access to medical services in rural areas. But it won’t bring new dollars to fight a scourge that kills nearly 100 people a day.

“As Americans we cannot allow this to continue,” Trump said in a speech at the White House, where he bemoaned an epidemic he said had spared no segment of society, affecting rural areas and cities, rich and poor and both the elderly and newborns.

“It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction,” he said. “We can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic.”

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/trump-tackle-opioid-addiction-white-house-speech-50728147

As far as I can tell, my kindred, Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, died clean and sober. The same can not be said about Peter Lawford, who Liz invited to join her at the Betty Ford Clinic that would not have become what it was, a Recovery House for the Rich and Famous, as well as the Common Man and Woman who suffer from Alcoholism and other Adictions……..if not for a Hollywood Star who set many trends. The Huffington Post suggests Trump would not have risen to become the President of the United States, if it were not for Liz, and the, or a, complex system that was tailormade for this beautiful woman with a Rose in her name. She wrote the Bible on Branding that Donald destroys before our eyes. Most humans that are someone, are in shock. Now we have an old World War Two Hero, and ex-president, grabbing the ass of youg beautifies – while in a wheelchair. What the fuck! Is nothing sacred?

“At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures,” the statement said. “To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke – and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner. Some have seen it as innocent; others clearly view it as inappropriate. To anyone he has offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely.”

Liz met and married a construction worker at the BFC. Her good friend, Michael Jackson, held a wedding for Liz and Larry at the Never Land Ranch. Micahal fell from grace for having inappropriate touching with children. The he overdosed on drugs. The owners of the pussies President Trump grabbed, were very young. Their fathers saw them as their child. What we are seeing is a massive fall from Grace. Our eagles are landing with a resounding – THUD! Our leaders are – DUDS!

We are going to hear about Peter Lawford, again, because PT is going to allow the opening of Presdient Kennedy’s sealed archives. Unsavory things went on at the Beverley Hills Hotel that led to the death of Marilyn Monroe who alledgly ODed. We will hear about immoral sex acts and other dark aspects of human nature that lead to – DOWNFALLS! All these matters are dealt with every day, around the clock, inside the doors of Alcoholis Anonymous.

Peter Lawford was a member of the Rat Pack a group of famous male singers whose music has been rediscovered by a young generation. They thought they were invincible, until Peter got – SLAMMED! There is nothing more demeaning, and excrucitating, then death by acute alcoholism. Every major organ is under attack – for years! These organ – FAIL! But, before that, comes – TOTAL FAILURE!

“Taylor also secured an acting job for Lawford, who was broke, in Malice in Wonderland. Lawford’s deal called for him to do two days’ work for $2,000, a pittance, but still cash. Six months later, just a day or two before he was to report for work, Lawford’s wife found him drinking vodka and smoking a joint. “He seemed terrified of going in front of the camera,” his wife told reporters. “When I found him he was completely out of it,” Lawford was treated at a hospital, and sent off to work. He collapsed on the set, and within a few days was dead.”

Peter and his family is in the Peerage next to the Kennedys. Lawford descends from European Nobilty, but, there may be another person that brings honor to their blood kin. Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was Knighted by the Queen. The Plague of Addiction does not honor royal badges, and will lay low a knight on a gallant steed, and a fool riding a donkey. The success rate for those who seek sobriety – is low! There are no guarantees. This is a terrifying truth to all Newcomers. Who wants to face TERRIFYING TRUTHS? We need leaders who are willing to do so. We need Truth Seekers who can keep their hands off women who do not want their touch. We need to remove Hollywood men who construct devious Casting Couches so they can rape women.

We do not need another Liz in Recovery, but, a human being dead or alive, that can be a role model for a New Standard. We are not born perfect like The Son of Man. The mere mortal, John the Baptist, preached an Atonement. Our every fault and defect is being magnified in a Media that was not in place when John and Jesus walked out of the wilderness, with a message…………..”Repent!”

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor may be the first woman to carry this message, to her brothers and sisters in Recovery, and to all of Humanity. In our case, it is not required that we find God of Jesus. I have not read whether or not Liz saw the light. But, as I read it, Jesus bids we try to meet God halfway. We got to do – some of the work!

My dear sister in Recovery was celebrating her first Sober Birthday at a party held at Rocky Point. Christine Rosamond Presco had a New Life waiting for her. She was doing the work. She was meeting God half way. I have not had a drink in over thirty years. I quit smoking fifteen years ago. I am still an eccentric, which is causing me problems, because I am being type-cast. My druggist point out that the new drug I will be starting to dead, in order to save my life, is costing the taxpayer $700 dollars a month. Am I worth it?

I am bid to fill out questionnaires. Some folks understand that I am a Living Miracle. Others want to believe I am the scum of the earth. Then, there are those who want what I have, and, what Christine and Elizabeth, owned, and will own, forever!

Jon Presco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Pack

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/liz-delighted-to-be-a-dame/

http://thepeerage.com/p6521.htm

After years of silence, Larry Fortensky, the construction worker who met Elizabeth Taylor in rehab and became her eighth and final husband, has opened up about their years together – and their conversation just days before the screen legend died last month at 79.

“She was going into hospital the next day,” Fortensky, 59, tells Britain’s Daily Mail of their final talk. “I thought she was going to be okay. I told her she would outlive me. She said, ‘Larry, I’m going to be okay.’ ”

LOS ANGELES— Elizabeth Taylor slipped on a pair of reading glasses, opened a blue notebook and extinguished her cigarette.

”This,” she said, holding up the notebook, ”is the journal I kept every night at the Betty Ford drug center. Everyone there has to do it. I’ll read you the first entry.”

” ‘Today is Friday. I’ve been here since Monday night, one of the strangest and most frightening nights of my life. Not to mention lonely. But I am not alone. There are people here just like me, who are suffering just like me, who hurt inside and out, just like me, people I’ve learned to love. It’s an experience unlike any other I’ve known.’ ”

She looked up. ”Should I go on?” she asked. She continued.

” ‘Nobody wants anything from anybody else, except to share and help. It’s probably the first time since I was 9 that nobody’s wanted to exploit me. Now the bad news. I feel like hell. I’m going through withdrawal. My heart feels big and pounding. I can feel the blood rush through my body. I can almost see it, running like red water over the boulders in my pain-filled neck and shoulders, then through my ears and into my pounding head. My eyelids flutter. Oh God, I am so, so tired.’ ”

She paused and leafed through the journal, emotions skittering involuntarily across her face.”The rest,” she said, ”is too private.”

Out of the Clinic for a Year

It is a little over a year since Elizabeth Taylor – whose movie career, marriages and illnesses have become the stuff of Hollywood legend – left the Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol rehabilitation in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where she was treated for alcoholism and drug addiction. Last week, she discussed her experiences at the center in an interview.

”I was the first celebrity to go to the center,” she said. ”Since then, quite a few have gone. Liza Minnelli, Mary Tyler Moore, Tony Curtis, Johnny Cash. But don’t get the idea that the center is a spa for stars. All kinds of people go there, including street junkies. It’s the great leveler.”

Yet, sitting in the living room of her home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, with steam rising from the heated swimming pool outside, with Renoirs, Rouaults and Modiglianis hung neatly on the walls, and with her Burmese cat curled in her lap, Miss Taylor did not look as if she had been leveled at all. Indeed, her more ardent fans would say that she has never looked better. Certainly, she hasn’t looked better in some time.

She has lost 45 pounds. Her hair is silver and black, smoothed into a kind of punk bubble. Wearing a black sweater and black stirrup pants tucked into black cowboy boots, she looked almost girlish. But her jewelry – minus the engagement ring from Dennis Stein, whom she said she had just decided not to marry – was that of a mature woman. And her words were not those of an ingenue.

”Not being a drunk is the only way I’m going to stay alive,” she said. ”Drunk is a hard word, but I’ve had to be hard with myself to face it. A drunk is a drunk. Somebody who drinks too much is a drunk. Somebody that takes too many pills is a junkie. There’s no polite way of saying it.”

In December 1983, Miss Taylor had been hospitalized, ostensibly because of a bowel obstruction. While she was there, her children, her brother and sister-in-law, and the actor Roddy McDowall visited her to initiate what is known in rehabilitation centers as family intervention.

”I was in such a drugged stupor that when they filed into my room I thought, ‘Oh, how nice, my family are all here to visit,’ ” she said. ”Then they sat down and each read from papers they had prepared, each saying they loved me, each describing incidents they’d witnessed of my debilitation, and each saying that if I kept on the way I was with drugs, I would die.”

”For 35 years, I couldn’t go to sleep without at least two sleeping pills,” she said. ”I’m a genuine insomniac. And I’d always taken a lot of medication for pain. I’d had 19 major operations, and drugs had become a crutch. I wouldn’t take them only when I was in pain. I was taking a lot of Percodan. I’d take Percodan and a couple of drinks before I would go out. I just felt I had to get stoned to get over my shyness. I needed oblivion, escape.”

”Then I realized that my family wouldn’t have come unless I’d really reached the bottom,” she said. ”I didn’t get angry with them. I was astonished. Then, after feeling this overwhelming sense of guilt, I realized that I had to get help. I became a drunk and a junkie with great determination, and with the same great resolve that got me to that point, I could turn it to work for me. You have to come to that decision by yourself. That night, I went to the center.”

She was there for seven weeks. Like the other patients, she had to share a room with a stranger. She wore jeans and sweatclothes, ate in the cafeteria and went to daily meetings similar to those of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The first week was spent detoxifying. ”I went through terrific withdrawals,” Miss Taylor said. ”While it’s happening, you talk about it a lot to your counselors, and you suffer. But I never had convulsions. By the second week, I finally admitted that I was an alcoholic and that I had a drug problem. You see, I’d always thought to myself, ‘I can stop drinking whenever I want.’ It’s classic. I’d always stopped, for example, when I went to fat farms. Or I’d wake up with a hangover and say, ‘Oh God, I’m never going to do that again.’ Yeah, not until the next Bloody Mary. I had to learn to tell the truth.”

There are no bars on the windows at the Betty Ford clinic. No locks.

”You could go over the wall if you wanted,” Miss Taylor said. ”That’s what we jokingly called leaving. But there wasn’t even a wall. What keeps you there is your honor. And what makes the center additionally effective is its discipline. I’d never been to school, so the regimentation worked on me. We’d be up at 6:30, breakfast at 7, and then we had to attend meetings, lectures and group therapy.”

It was in group therapy, Miss Taylor said, that her final defenses were broken down. ”In group therapy, you’re up for grabs,” she said. ”People call you on everything. You can tell when somebody is hiding behind lies. After a while, all of your gimmicks and tricks are stripped away. You’re raw, defenseless. That’s when it starts being constructive. That’s when you learn who you are.”

While she was at the center, Miss Taylor decided to make her rehabilitation public. ”I knew the public would find out anyway,” she said. ”Some photographers came with their telephoto lenses and managed to take pictures of me in the garden and published them. At least they blanked out the other people’s faces.”

”Betty Ford and I discussed what it would be like to go public,” she continued. ”She had done it and was the better for it. I just hoped the public would understand. My friends have been totally supportive, and if anything, they feel relief and pride. Not one has rejected me.”

At the end of seven weeks, Miss Taylor, and those who had successfully completed their stay at the center, went through a graduation exercise. ”They give you a medallion the last day,” she recalled. ”Then you go back to receive one after three months, six months, and then a year.”

Clinic Program Seems to Have Worked

Elizabeth Taylor’s stay at the Betty Ford clinic has apparently worked for her. She will continue to work, she said, and she will stick to her diet, about which she feels a triumphant sense of accomplishment.

”I lost 11 pounds in the center,” she said, ”but I was still 45 pounds over. When I got out, I stuffed myself with candies. So I came up with my own diet and applied the same principles I’d used in giving up booze and drugs. I’m thrilled.”

”The only obsession I have left is cigarettes,” she said. ”I didn’t really smoke until the center. My God, I’d never seen so much smoke and coffee drinking as I did there. It was a regular den of iniquity. But I’ll stop smoking the way I’ve done everything else. One day at a time.”

”Stopping any addiction is basically an ongoing process,” she concluded. ”Although the rate of cure at Betty Ford is about 75 percent, it’s not like seven weeks there undoes years of drugs and alcohol. You have to re- create what you learned every day. Staying clean becomes a dedication. If you need to rekindle your promise, you have key people to call. Or you repeat the A.A. ‘Serenity Prayer’ whenever you need to. And treatment at the center doesn’t always work. Peter Lawford was there the same time I was.” Her voice got very small. ”He didn’t make it.”

photo of Elizabeth Taylor

Patients live in clusters of 20 (there’s only room for 60 at any one time) at the hospital and spend virtually the whole day in the residential wing. They have private rooms with patios, but share living spaces, and do all the household cleaning themselves. It’s a treatment program, not unlike the one at Long Beach Naval Hospital that Mrs. Ford underwent in 1978, except that at the Betty Ford Center, the program was redesigned to be of especial value to women.

“Most facilities dealing with chemical dependency problems are geared to men,” a center official said, “and even in coeducational treatment groups, women are more likely to focus on the men and stay locked into their traditional role of nurturing others and putting the needs of others before their own.” So a portion of the program and one wing of the center are designed just for women.

“In this program,” said the spokesman, “we emphasize the dangers of overmedication that women, especially upper-middle-class women, face. Too often their physicians prescribe pills when some other kind of therapy is called for—usually psychotherapy. And we try to train women to gear up for their own independence, how to eliminate anger, how to eliminate guilt over children, and general survival skills.

“The center was not designed to be a celebrity spa, and it really isn’t one. We have all kinds of people here, and they all follow the same general treatment program. But since so many celebrities have been coming here, we’ve tried to address their special needs. Living in the public eye creates special stresses and living with entourages where the celebrity is coddled and catered to are some of the things we try to address. We encourage them to stay in touch with ‘key people’ whenever they feel resolve waning, or circumstances overwhelming. That’s why you see them at parties with people who are there sometimes just to keep that resolve firm. It works.”

HOW THE BETTY FORD Center began to attract celebrities has something to do with how Mrs. Ford has helped transform the public’s perception about the nature of alcohol and drug treatment facilities.

In 1978, at the request of her family, Mrs. Ford entered the Naval Hospital, which had been treating naval alcoholics for 13 years. She didn’t enter as the result of a binge, or for detoxification, or even as an alcoholic. She issued a statement upon admission which said that as a result of years of muscle and nerve problems she “has been overmedicating herself.” She insisted she was not a drug or alcohol abuser, but merely “chemically dependent,” In her autobiography. The Times of My Life, she wrote, “For 14 years, I’d been on medications for pinched nerves, arthritis, and muscle spasms in my neck and I’d lost my tolerance for pills. If I had a single drink on top of the pills, it would make me groggy.”

SOME WEEKS LATER, sober and enlisted in Alcoholics Anonymous, she emerged from the hospital, determined to do something for people, especially women, who were similarly afflicted. She felt some bitterness against the medical profession for treating women with pills and shots, and toward society for encouraging vast amounts of social drinking. (She cites “magic martinis” served in the White House.) The Betty Ford Center was born.

Enter the redoubtable Elizabeth Taylor in late 1983. Like many celebrities who drink or use drugs, Taylor was hospitalized for treatment under a pretense. She was ostensibly admitted to a California hospital for “a bowel obstruction,” But during her stay she was persuaded by family and friends to enter the Betty Ford Center, The thought terrified her and her public relations staff until they talked things over with Betty Ford herself, who remains active as a counselor at the center. The message of the Betty Ford Center—“We are the abused, not really the abusers”— won Taylor over.

On December 5, 1983, Elizabeth Taylor checked into the Betty Ford Center. A press release was distributed that stated, “She selected the Betty Ford Center because she has great admiration for Betty Ford and believed her problem to be very similar to those experienced by Mrs. Ford in that much of her treatment stems from prescription drug administration over a period of years to combat her various medical problems. She expressed concern for the privacy of other patients undergoing treatment as well as for herself and hopes the press will respect the basic principles of the Center regarding the anonymity of all concerned.”

Most celebrities issued similar statements as they went into the center—even though many of them weren’t hooked on prescription drugs, but on street drugs like cocaine and heroin. It didn’t matter. They all qualified as victims.

Mrs. Ford and Taylor took recovery very seriously, and each, shortly after entering her program, gave up the prone posture of victim. Taylor no longer blamed medications. She said she was a drunk, “Not being a drunk is the only way I’m going to stay alive,” Taylor told The New York Times recently, “Drunk is a hard word, but I’ve had to be hard with myself to face it. A drunk is a drunk. Somebody who drinks too much is a drunk. Somebody that takes too many pills is a junkie. There’s not a polite way of saying it.” Addiction chic was born.

Hollywood, ever the home of trends, was fascinated by Taylor’s admission. “She made being a drunk into a sickness,” says a Beverly Hills PR man, “and she made it no sin to be sick.” Shortly after being released from the center, Taylor’s career took a turn for the better, especially on television. Along with cameos on the evening soap operas, she signed a $500,000 contract for a made-for-TV movie called Malice in Wonderland, in which she portrayed Louella Parsons, the Hollywood gossip who ruined the career of many a star by hinting in print at their liquor and drug problems.

And, not to neglect a point of paramount importance in Hollywood, she looked great. She lost 11 pounds in the center, and quickly lost 45 more. She began showing up at Michael Jackson concerts, at Prince concerts in a punk wig, on Broadway, and everywhere else. Other stars soon followed her to Betty’s door.

A friend of Liza Minnelli—who entered the clinic last summer—says Minnelli did so “because of the publicity that Liz Taylor got, I think people felt it was nothing to be ashamed of, Elizabeth Taylor looked better when she came out and she told people she was feeling good for the first time in years. I think that it was Liza’s feeling that it was O.K. to do it. It was not fashionable when Taylor did it, and Liza’s a follower, not a leader.”

Says one woman, a friend of a star who underwent therapy at the center with her friend, “The first thing I’d do in the morning is walk down the corridors of the three residential units to see ‘Who’s here today?’ It was like being at Ma Maison on Friday lunch.”

The other patients, wrestling with their problems and undergoing detoxification, were nonetheless star-struck. Some brought autograph books to the hospital, creating a difficult situation for a program where anonymity is a key principle of recovery.

Taylor solved the problem, though. Upon admission, each patient is given a volume called “The Blue Book,” a kind of “Lives and Acts of the Apostles” of Alcoholics Anonymous that contains brief biographies and memoirs by A.A. members about their struggles. The authors are identified by first or nickname only. Taylor inscribed the end papers of these books with a mere “Love, Elizabeth,” The patients cherish these volumes.

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NOT ALL OF the patients who enter the Betty Ford clinic recover. At Taylor’s urging, Peter Lawford checked into the clinic. He told Hollywood reporter Malcolm Boyes soon afterward, “I really think Elizabeth saved my life by persuading me to check into the Betty Ford. Her entering there made a lot of people wake up to the fact that they had a problem … myself included. There is a joke going around town at the moment that you’re nothing unless you’ve been to Betty Ford, But seriously, it is terrific that people like myself who do have a problem are facing it.”

Taylor also secured an acting job for Lawford, who was broke, in Malice in Wonderland. Lawford’s deal called for him to do two days’ work for $2,000, a pittance, but still cash. Six months later, just a day or two before he was to report for work, Lawford’s wife found him drinking vodka and smoking a joint. “He seemed terrified of going in front of the camera,” his wife told reporters. “When I found him he was completely out of it,” Lawford was treated at a hospital, and sent off to work. He collapsed on the set, and within a few days was dead.

“Stopping an addiction,” Taylor said in her New York Times interview after Lawford’s death, “is basically an ongoing process… Although the cure rate at Betty Ford is about 75 percent, it’s not like seven weeks there undoes years of drugs and alcohol. You have to re-create what you learned every day. Staying clean becomes a dedication. If you need to rekindle your promise, you have key people to call. Or you repeat the A.A. Serenity Prayer whenever you need to. And treatment at the center doesn’t always work, Peter Lawford was there the same time I was… He didn’t make it.”

But, upon his death, Lawford achieved something thousands in Hollywood aspire to. His sad story received massive magazine and TV coverage. Says a People magazine editor, “Right now that’s all you have to do to make the cover—enroll in the Betty Ford Center, or die within a few months of leaving. It’s a guaranteed cover. It’s that chic.”

After years of silence, Larry Fortensky, the construction worker who met Elizabeth Taylor in rehab and became her eighth and final husband, has opened up about their years together – and their conversation just days before the screen legend died last month at 79.

“She was going into hospital the next day,” Fortensky, 59, tells Britain’s Daily Mail of their final talk. “I thought she was going to be okay. I told her she would outlive me. She said, ‘Larry, I’m going to be okay.’ ”

It was the coda to the most unlikely of romances between the most famous actress of her generation and a man 20 years her junior who couldn’t have been more anonymous.

They met at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1998. “Elizabeth was in there for pills, I was in there for beer,” Fortensky says. “I knew who she was, of course, but I can’t tell you that I remember watching any of her films.”

They bonded quickly. “She was funny and sweet, and the more I got to know her, the sweeter she became,” he says. “Of course, she was very pretty, and I wasn’t too bad looking in those days, either. We had an instant physical attraction.”

Yearning to Be Free

They were married in 1991 at a lavish ceremony at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch. And they had several happy years together. Fortensky points to a picture of Taylor frolicking in the snow, taken in Switzerland in 1992. “We were in bed, and she sat up and said, ‘I want to make a snow angel.’ She grabbed a fur coat and put it over her nightdress,” he says.

“That’s how I remember Elizabeth. She had a childishness about her. She was 20 years older than me, but I never felt she was old.”

The spotlight on their marriage – and on them – placed a strain on the relationship. “Those cameras everywhere,” he says. “Elizabeth was used to it. I never got used to it.”

They split in 1996 but would remain friends and – just as Taylor did with another husband, John Warner – they spoke regularly, right up until her death.

“I have wonderful memories of my time with Elizabeth, and I will treasure her memory forever,” he says. “I love her. I always will. And I know she loved me, too.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/04/style/elizabeth-taylor-journal-of-a-recovery.html?pagewanted=all

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lawford

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemont_College

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunks_(film)