The elephant in the room: 'Moyers on Addiction: Close to Home.'

In the midseventies, there was a brilliant TV commercial for some alcoholism treatment center, which I remember as "The Elephant in the Living Room." Here's the gag. We see an irenic domestic tableau, dad reading the paper, mom knitting, brother and sister playing Monopoly or something on the carpet; suddenly there's this trumpeted roar right out of a Tarzan movie, and this elephant - this I mean big damn elephant - crashes through the back wall and proceeds to stomp all over the living room. And nobody even looks up.

You get it, right? If you've got an addict (or, for that matter, a psychotic or a manic-depressive or just a generic creep) in your family, the ordinary, the human impulse is, quite simply, to ignore it for as long as possible. After all, what's one elephant more or less?

One of my few complaints about "Moyers on Addiction: Close to Home," the fine series airing on PBS beginning March 29 (check local listings), is that the writers missed the chance to use that commercial somewhere in the five episodes of the show. Otherwise "Close to Home" unrolls as probably one of the sanest, most grown-up statements yet to emerge in our national - and frequently goofy - dialogue on addiction.

For Moyers himself, furthermore, the series is personal, even cathartic, in a way his other ventures haven't been. As he acknowledges early in the first installment, a few years ago he and his wife found the topic really close to home, when they discovered that their oldest son, William, had a serious problem with drugs and booze: their very own elephant in their very own living room.

Reference is made throughout the series to William's recovery, relapse, and eventual re-recovery. (This is the pattern, by the way, that addicts pretty much have to look forward to: the elephant never goes all the way away.) But - as you might expect if you know Moyers's previous work, his series of "Conversations" with influential thinkers, or his series "Genesis" or "The Language of Life" - the references are all in the interest of the show, and never merely, tawdry confessional.

Addiction, after all, is a sexy topic, drenched in the allure of the bizarre and the verboten. We may choose to ignore it in the living room, but we love to see it on the screen. Could the Jerry Springers of the world survive for a week without guests abjectly "addicted" to - well, to booze or coke or smack or shopping or sex (and I've never understood why that one is an addiction) or, at the very least, to collecting Beanie Babies? And actors, notoriously, love playing withdrawal scenes, because they not only get to chew the scenery, they get to chew the scenery.

But none of that here. The series is almost puritanically nontabloid, and because of that it's not, about the subject of addiction itself, destructively puritanical.

The first show, "Portrait of Addiction," is essentially a montage of tight, close-up interviews with nine recovering addicts, from a wide range of walks and classes, describing the arc of their using. And whatever the substance, the arc is always the same, from euphoria to dependence on obsessive craving and planning to sate the craving. (The most terrible thing about being a junkie is that you know every day will always be the same: always.) Not much new there, except that the show has the courage to allow its nine very articulate junkies to state what somehow always gets lost in our normal discussions of addiction: the pure fact that folks get hooked on one substance or another because the substance makes you feel by God fantastic - for a while.

I highlight this just because - and, of course, I write as an alumnus - it's so elementary and so seldom recognized in our "just say no" or fried-egg "this is your brain on drugs" TV spots. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, "Hey! I'd really like to be an addict!" People use junk because junk is really fun. As part 2, "The Hijacked Brain," makes clear, dope (booze and nicotine included here) releases dopamine, a feel-great reward thingie, for the brain to play with. Now this is usually a hormone that you earn by completing a task: building a bookcase, tending your garden, writing a novel. But the stuff gives you the reward without having to go through the tedium, same ultimate effect with less wasted motion. This series makes points about substance abuse that need to be made, and that, largely, haven't been. As: folks do it because they like it. As: a certain - pretty considerable - percentage of the population is always, just naturally, going to want to get high. And as: Draconian measures like interdiction and incarceration - our now-decades-old "War on Drugs," and one of the Seven Great Running Jokes of the Modern World - do not and cannot work.

The show doesn't go quite far enough to suit me. Cards on the table here, I believe that the only solution to the problem is to declare it not a "problem": that is, across-the-board, blanket legalization. Of everything. In the countries where it's been tried, the user population has either stayed the same or declined a fraction (let's face it: for a kid, at least, the seduction of the forbidden is at least as much a rush as the rush itself).

Episode 3 examines the ways in which kids, including the kids of addicts, can be educated to, if not avoid, at least understand and minimize, the effects of the condition. Part 4 discusses the existing treatment programs and makes the crucial point that treatment needs to be as personalized as various junkies are - and they are - personal. One size, in other words, does not fit all.

Part 5 is the payoff and - given our regnant paranoia about the subject - it's quite brave. Moyers doesn't, as I said, go so far as to suggest legalization; but he does make a strong case citing programs already in place - for decriminalization, meaning mandated counseling for users rather than imprisonment. The controlling metaphor in this segment is the remarkable turnabout in our national attitude toward smoking (and I light another Dunhill as I type this): cigarette use has declined precipitately just because folks have begun to talk about how fundamentally bad it is.

Not that I, a dedicated smoker, find all this so inspiriting. But the fact is that "Close to Home," compared to the righteous nonsense normally mumbled by our politicians and pundits about the "problem" of addiction, is genuinely crystalline in its cogency.

I've never been a real fan of Moyers: a little too facile, a little too glib about ideas, I always thought. But this time around, I found myself compelled to admit the obvious: he's as much a public intellectual, serious and sensitive, as TV has so far produced. And "public intellectual" is an honorable role. "Close to Home" is eminently worth watching as a careful consideration of a condition that affects practically everybody, that is not going to go away, and that hasn't, on TV, ever been discussed this sensibly.