You’ve been told a huge lie about Presley Gerber’s death: KENNEDY

I wasn’t surprised to read that Hayden Panettiere, 36, was reportedly in a Malibu, California drug rehab clinic just weeks before she died of an overdose in a Greenville, South Carolina loft.

Or that Presley Gerber, 27, the handsome son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, was found dead of a suspected OD inside a luxury Santa Monica facility.

I’m saddened, sickened, by these tragic premature deaths. But surprised? No.

American culture stopped taking drug rehabilitation seriously years ago. 

When Amy Winehouse sang ‘They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, no, no, no,’ I knew we had a problem.

Working at MTV in the 90s, I bumped up against struggling addicts on a near-weekly basis. They muted the overwhelming racket of celebrity with drugs and alcohol. Some survived. Others didn’t. 

Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain infamously escaped from Exodus Recovery Center in Marina Del Rey, California shortly before his 1994 suicide.

I’ll never forget the drummer from the popular 90s band who, unbeknownst to me, shot heroin in my bathroom. I once loaned him $600 to pay his rent (Shocker: he bought drugs with the money). He called me from rehab to make amends and ended up turning his life around. But I never got paid back.

Then there was the singer for one of my favorite bands, who borrowed $80 from me to buy a train ticket. I only found out that the ticket cost $6 when his mortified wife called me after he went to rehab. He’s still kicking today.

For addicts like them, dipping in and out of rehab was like going to a day spa. Seeking help for substance abuse had never been so casual.

Before the Betty Ford Center was established in the California desert in 1982, rehab clinics were mostly for street drunks and pill-popping housewives, who hid their supposedly shameful struggles. The stigma of their illnesses nearly guaranteed that they’d never utter a word about them.

Then, in the 90s, that started to change and mostly for the better. Mainstream artists started visiting places like Promises in West Hollywood and they didn’t make much of a secret about it. It stopped being a deplorable act to admit your demons had overtaken your angels.

But at the same time, in a sick way, rehab was glamorized. It became a place for bad boys and iconoclasts, not just addicts.

In the 2000s, rehab arguably became trendy.

Winehouse released the song Rehab in 2006. She first checked into an actual rehab in 2007. The show Celebrity Rehab with Dr Drew, a board-certified internist and an addiction medicine specialist, premiered in 2008.

Tabloids chronicled stars checking into high-end facilities which turned treatment into an upscale experience. 

Private equity firms moved in, sensing an opportunity for profit and driving hundreds of 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.’

Even Gerber, according to a source who spoke to the Daily Mail, 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.