Reports that Hayden Panettiere, 36, had spent time at a drug rehabilitation center in Malibu, California, just weeks before her reported overdose death in a Greenville, South Carolina loft did not come as a surprise to me.
Neither did the news that Presley Gerber, the 27-year-old son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, was reportedly found dead from a suspected overdose inside a luxury facility in Santa Monica.
These premature deaths are heartbreaking and deeply disturbing. But unexpected? Sadly, no.
For years, American culture has treated drug rehabilitation less as a serious medical intervention than as a temporary stop in the lives of celebrities.
When Amy Winehouse sang, “They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, no, no, no,” it sounded to me like a warning that society had lost sight of the seriousness of addiction.
During my time at MTV in the 1990s, I encountered people battling addiction almost every week. Drugs and alcohol offered them a way to silence the relentless noise surrounding celebrity life. Some managed to survive it. Others did not.
Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” became an emblem of the increasingly casual way addiction treatment was discussed in popular culture.
Reports said Hayden Panettiere, 36, had been treated at a Malibu, California, rehabilitation clinic shortly before her reported overdose death in Greenville, South Carolina.
Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain famously left the Exodus Recovery Center in Marina Del Rey, California, shortly before his suicide in 1994.
I also remember a drummer from a major 1990s band secretly injecting heroin in my bathroom. On another occasion, I lent him $600 for rent; predictably, the money went toward drugs instead. He later contacted me from rehab to apologize and ultimately rebuilt his life, although the loan was never repaid.
A singer from one of my favorite groups once asked me for $80 to buy a train ticket. His embarrassed wife later revealed that the ticket cost only $6, after he had entered rehab. He is still alive today.
For people struggling with addiction, repeatedly entering and leaving treatment could seem almost as routine as visiting a spa. Seeking help for substance abuse had become strikingly informal.
Before the Betty Ford Center opened in the California desert in 1982, rehabilitation programs were largely associated with street alcoholics and housewives hiding pill addictions. Because addiction carried such intense shame, many sufferers felt unable to speak openly about their illness.
That began to shift during the 1990s, and in many ways the change was positive. Well-known musicians and performers started checking into facilities such as Promises in West Hollywood, often speaking publicly about it. Admitting that addiction had overwhelmed them was no longer viewed solely as a disgrace.
Yet rehabilitation was also glamorized in an unhealthy way. It became part of the mythology surrounding rebellious celebrities and cultural outsiders, rather than being understood primarily as treatment for a potentially fatal illness.
Presley Gerber appears with his sister, Kaia, and parents Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber in Los Angeles on May 20, 2026.
Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain famously left the Exodus Recovery Center in Marina Del Rey, California, shortly before his 1994 suicide.
Kennedy attends the MTV Video Music Awards in 1993.
By the 2000s, entering rehab could arguably look less like a medical necessity and more like a celebrity trend.
Winehouse released “Rehab” in 2006 and entered an actual treatment program the following year. In 2008, the reality series Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew premiered, placing addiction treatment directly in the entertainment spotlight. Its host, Dr. Drew, is a board-certified internist and addiction-medicine specialist.
Tabloids chronicled stars checking into high-end facilities which turned treatment into an upscale experience.
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Private equity firms moved in, sensing an opportunity for profit and driving hundreds of reporting mergers.
The substance abuse treatment market last year was valued at nearly $6 billion and projected to hit nearly $12 billion by 2033, according to analysis by Verified Market Research.
Today, there are reportedly 14,000 treatment centers in the US. Malibu is so riddled with luxury rehabs, you can’t swing Gavin Newsom’s mullet without hitting one.
None of this is to say that rehab is not effective or necessary for some people. But along with the destigmatization of addiction seemed to come a false belief that these clinics provided neatly packaged solutions for serious, potentially deadly, issues.
Addiction, of course, is far more insidious than that.
By all accounts, Gerber’s famous parents did everything they thought they should for their troubled son, but Dr Drew says a luxe rehab was not where, he believes, Gerber really needed to be.
‘I’m of the opinion someone like Presley Gerber should be in a psychiatric hospital, a full-service hospital with nurses, internists and psychiatrists,’ Dr Drew told TMZ.
The facility where Gerber died is a retrofitted $7.7 million, 7-bedroom mansion. A far cry from Alcoholic Anonymous meetings in church basements.
‘In term of the poshness of these facilities… they should not be spending their money on the environment,’ Dr Drew said of rehab facilities in general. ‘They should be spending their money on the care of the patients and the staff.’
There are no allegations of wrongdoing against any of the facilities that treated Gerber or Panettiere.
‘Whenever I see an elaborate facility or a facility that is making lots of money, I don’t trust it,’ Dr Drew continued. ‘To me, the treatment of drug addiction is not a good business… it requires so much human resources… so if people are making a lot of money of it, I’m already suspect.’
‘I’m of the opinion someone like Presley Gerber should be in a psychiatric hospital, a full-service hospital with nurses, internists and psychiatrists,’ Dr Drew told TMZ
Even Gerber, according to a source who spoke to Our News Outlet, doubted that rehab was helping him. ‘He had been in rehab many times and didn’t like it,’ the source said. ‘He was very vocal about saying rehab does not work. He even said on his show that rehab had a 98 percent failure rate, so he was not a fan.’
Just nine months ago, Gerber posted a video, detailing the multiple drugs he was taking to treat his addiction and mental health struggles and confessed that he was struggling to keep track of them.
‘All these doctors say a lot of different things, so it’s kind of scary,’ he said in the clip.
That admission, said Dr Drew, should have triggered immediate ‘psychiatric hospitalization.’
Maybe it did, at the time.
So far there is no indication of foul play related to either Gerber or Panettiere’s deaths, but investigations are underway into how they obtained the drugs that ultimately killed them.
There is also no doubt that they should still be alive.
Perhaps it’s time to rethink how addicts interact with the rehab industry and how we can make treatment more than a very public stop on a deadly road to ruin.
