An HBO executive's private pain fuels a documentary series about addiction

HBO unleashed some of the industry's best documentary filmmakers to take on the subject of addiction, a project born from the frustration of a top HBO executive whose son has struggled with alcohol and cocaine problems.

The film "Addiction," debuts on Thursday in the United States, and all of its documentaries will be available to download for free from HBO's Web site.

It stitches together stories shot by leading documentarians D.A. Pennebaker, Rory Kennedy, Barbara Kopple, Jon Alpert, Alan and Susan Raymond and others. HBO has lined up 18 films on the topic, most made especially for the series, to air over the weekend on its cable channels.

It began with the realization by Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films, that she understood little about the problems with her son David.

David, 26 and a location assistant for "The Sopranos," has been sober for about a year after a decade of substance abuse problems. Nevins had tried every approach she could think of to help him. Psychiatrists, rehab centers, tough love _ she had been through it all.

"I was doing all these things and it never occurred to me it was a brain disease," she said.

Every relapse meant more heartache.

"I didn't know the relapse rate was between 75 and 85 percent," she said. "I didn't really know. I thought relapse was my failure as a parent and his failure as a child."

If she did not understand _ working in an industry where `rehab' is hardly a foreign concept _ she figured many others did not, either.

Nevins is in a unique position to spread the word. Nevins has received 17 prime-time Emmy Awards, 24 News and Documentary Emmys and 25 Peabody Awards. HBO is one of the premier outlets for documentaries.

The short films that are a part of "Addictions" include Alpert's look at a busy Saturday night in a Dallas emergency room; Kennedy and Liz Garbus' examination of brain imaging; and Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus' piece on opiate addiction.

Each of the short pieces included in "Addiction" will be expanded and shown separately through the weekend, along with four other independent documentaries. Also, the network is embarking on a public information campaign with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has given $1.5 million (euro1.1 million) to the project.

The series strongly communicates the message of addiction as a brain disease, which is not entirely accepted by the public or even the medical community, said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"We need to create an empathy so we don't react with anger and a stigma to the person who is addicted, which doesn't help anyone _ the person or society," Volkow said.