Drew’s Demons : Mother: ‘As a parent, I’m not always supposed to be the nice guy.’

Drew Barrymore became a star at age 6 thanks to her role in “E.T.” Three years later she took her first drink. She smoked pot at 10, snorted cocaine at 12 and contemplated suicide at 14. The actress has battled drug dependencies for almost two years and now, at 15, believes she has kicked her habits. So does her mother, Jaid, a single parent who, along with Drew, has undergone intensive counseling. Mother and daughter talked with Times staff writer Michael Quintanilla about how their lives fell apart, how they have tried to correct their mistakes and how other families can help to prevent a similar tragedy.

Jaid Barrymore never liked to set rules for daughter Drew because the child actress always broke them.

But, in January, she laid down the law in an effort to be a responsible mother, Jaid explains between sips of hot tea. Drew has a curfew. Her friends are drug-free. She attends school regularly.

“I got help for our problems. If you don’t get help, your child could die,” Jaid says about the counseling she sought for her daughter’s drug dependencies as well as her own emotional problems.

“How could Drew look upon me with any measure of respect and confidence if I was physically there as a mother, but I wasn’t emotionally there as a full-time mother?”

And there were other problems that contributed to her daughter’s downward spiral into drug and alcohol abuse. Drew was “genetically predisposed to being an addict-alcoholic” (in her new autobiography, Drew writes that her father had “a lengthy history of alcohol- and drug-related problems”), and the child actress suffered from tremendous peer pressure.

Jaid adds, “There wasn’t a father in her life who was supportive and loving for her in any way.

“We were very busy running around with the business. Socially we were going to parties at restaurants and nightclubs and award shows. Drew was making personal appearances and thrust into a grown-up world. And I felt that as long as I was with her, it was all right.”

At clubs and parties, Jaid says, the mother-daughter team split up as soon as they walked in the door. When no one was looking, the little girl headed toward abandoned drinks and cigarettes.

“At the time, Drew shouldn’t have been there at those places at those late hours,” says Jaid, adding that she drinks socially and does not use drugs.

“That was very wrong on my part. But I felt if she was with me or in the same place, I at least would know where she was and what she was doing. But in retrospect, that was not a good environment for her. In retrospect, I know now that I was making wrong choices and decisions.

“I was trying to be a single parent and a provider,” says Jaid, a woman in her mid-30’s who abandoned her own dreams of being an actress and turned to managing her daughter’s career 10 years ago.

“The most frequent question I get is, ‘Where were you when all this was going on with Drew?’ I was there the whole time, but unfortunately, I didn’t realize or understand the complexity of what was going on.”

She says she didn’t know how to deal with Drew’s drug problems because, as a parent, she didn’t have a clue of her own co-dependency--a term used to describe a pattern of dependence on compulsive behaviors and approval from others in an attempt to find self-esteem and identity.

“We had a disease of extremes--she was the controller and I was the martyr.

“I was keeping her from having her fun,” Jaid says. “She saw me as a villain, and that justified her negative behavior and her manipulation of me with lies on top of lies about what she was doing with whom.”

She says when she did act as a parent, she gave her daughter “too much autonomy, too much space to discover who she was as an individual and to detach from me.”

Jaid suspected her daughter was experimenting with drugs and drinking. But “I felt that I could control the situation by grounding her.”

The punishment never seemed to work.

“In terms of Drew, yes, the responsibility rested with me because she was young. She did not like me then, and I did not like her. We did not like each other. We did not respect each other. We were not kind to each other. We were both equally at fault in our dysfunctional relationship.”

Jaid says Drew’s problems reached a crisis state last July 4 when her daughter, in a desperate cry for help, intentionally cut her wrist three times with a kitchen knife. Drew’s friends rushed her to Cedars Sinai Medical Center, where she was treated and then admitted--for a third time--to the ASAP Family Treatment Program at Van Nuys Hospital.

Jaid, who was in New York at the time, returned home and realized that she, too, needed professional help. She later underwent six weeks of co-dependency counseling at a clinic near Phoenix, which was so structured that she was allowed only one five-minute phone call a week.

“If I am perceived in a negative fashion, then that is simply something I have to deal with. I made many mistakes, but what I did was get help and learn what to do.”

She says that is what every parent must do if he or she believes a child is using drugs.

“Be aware of the problem and the symptoms, like grades going down, skipping school, an attitude change, detachment, new friends,” she says.

“Adolescents hide things very well. When it gets to a point when they are no longer able to hide their drug use, then it’s very clear that things are pretty far gone.”

And, she adds, parents shouldn’t deny the problem exists or think they can fix it themselves “by locking up a kid in a room or beating them.”

“As a parent, you must get help. I can’t stress that enough. If you get help, there is hope. You must get treatment, therapy, help from qualified sources much more informed and aware and skilled than you are.

“The most important thing is to have the courage to be willing to look at your life, your participation in your child’s life and how that participation affects your child,” she says.

She says what happened to her daughter can happen to anyone’s child.

“It has nothing to do with who Drew is, a show biz kid. People say ‘Oh, Drew did this, Drew did that because she’s a Hollywood kid.’ I want to say, ‘Parents, look at your schools, look at your children, look at your peers. Look at the incredible ease of drug supply everywhere, and if your children want to be accepted by their peers, they will do it.

“It touches everybody, not just a single mother with a single child.

“Do whatever it takes. Every individual has to find their own program,” Jaid says. “But whatever it is, it gives you the foundation and support in order to make intelligent, healthy choices in your life.”

She says through her own counseling she has learned that as a parent, she must instill in Drew “a better sense of self-worth by accentuating what she does that’s good, not dwelling so much on what she does that’s wrong. That’s another thing I would like to tell parents.

“I wanted so badly to be a good parent to Drew,” she says.

Now she has a second chance to do it, to be “a good mother” while still managing her daughter’s career and supporting her sobriety.

“I believe in my heart that sobriety is something Drew wants for herself and for all the right reasons,” Jaid says. “She doesn’t want it for anyone else’s scrutiny or judgment.”

“I cannot live her life for her,” she says.

But as a caring parent, she can make it better.

“There is family structure in our lives now. Rules, respect, consistency, security,” Jaid adds with a sense of new-found authority. And she says Drew knows that “as a parent, I’m not always supposed to be the nice guy.”