Staging An Intervention

Convincing a friend or relative that he or she needs help with a drug problem is a difficult task best tackled using the "strength in numbers" approach. Here are a few tips to help your group make a much-needed breakthrough:

1. If you're already willing to take the initiative to contact and assemble a person's family and friends for a surprise intervention, keep in mind that you can kill two birds with one stone by scheduling it on the person's birthday.
2. During the intervention, it's important that you refrain from talking down to the person you're trying to help. Try to get all of that out of your system beforehand by having a conversation with your spouse.
3. Interventions have changed a lot from the old days when your father would simply pile a mound of cocaine on the coffee table and make you snort every last flake until you were so sick of it that you'd never touch the stuff again.
4. An intervention is not the time to rehash old arguments – like the time the subject got high and made out with your girlfriend at Stu's party even though you had just told him you were falling for her and that son of a bitch looked you right square in the eye and said how happy he was for you and later lied about the whole thing. Yeah, don't do that.
5. Studies have shown that acting out some role-playing scenes with puppets can be very effective when intervening on drug and alcohol abusers ages nine and under.
6. When doing an intervention for Mountain Dew addicts, keep in mind that these people are dangerous. Instead of getting them to quit cold turkey, work them down by substituting crack, PCP and raccoon tranquilizers.
7. As director of The Intervention, it is your job to make sure the lighting is correct and the cameras are rolling before the host tells America which team member has been voted off of the show.
8. Assure the subject that you are not there to judge them – especially since a parade of actual judges at countless court appearances don't seem to have had any impact.
9. Warning: if you find yourself invited to a close friend's house and arrive to find many of your friends seated in a circle, each of them adamantly trying to draw you a picture about something they desperately need you to understand before it's too late, you're not at an intervention – you're at a Pictionary party.