sleepless night the first of every tear i'm gonna cry ♪ ♪ here comes the pain here comes me wishing things had never changed ♪ ♪ and she was right here in my arms tonight ♪ ♪ but here comes good-bye ♪ >> rascal flatts. ended up another song. there is more music from the guys coming up a little later on. meanwhile welcome back to more of "today" on this friday morning. 10th day of july, 2009. out on the plaza on a picture perfect day for a concert, for anything for that matter. i'm matt lauer along with maria celeste, from telemundo who has been nice enough to help out all week long. you have any fun? >> i've been very cold but i've joined it tremendously. i'm purple everywhere. >> it is unseasonably cool today. >> of course, yes. >> by the way, if you love music today, monday more music. we have the fray here on monday morning. not just a concert by the way, they're giving away other concert tickets to some of their future shows. so if you're a fray fan, design a unique and creative sign, bring it down to the plaza. they will pick 25 of the best, and then give concert tickets to people holding those signs. that's monday, right here on our plaza. and maria, coming up in this half hour, we talked about what seems to be a dangerous deal going on in hollywood, and other cities across the country for that matter. apparently if you have money and some celebrity, you can go into a doctor and trade that money for prescription drugs. and in the wake of the death of michael jackson there's a concern that prescription drugs may have played a role in that. dr. drew pinski is going to join us to give us some perspective on what could be a very troubling situation. >> only ironically, it really can be deadly. >> no question. >> if your mind reacts like a pinball machine when you see a sale sign at the mall you could be headed for trouble. we're going to be talking to experts on why some people use shopping as their therapy, and if that describes you we'll give you tips on how you can get your spending under control. >> all right. a lot to get to right now. ann is wrapping up a week of vacation. natalie's over at the news desk with all the headlines. that lie, take it away. >> good morning. president obama heads to africa today, wrapping up what he called a productive three-day summit to italy. before leaving the president, first lady and both daughters visit the vatican for their first-ever audience with the pope. at a press conference earlier, president obama said the g-8 leaders pledged to work harder towards tackling climate change, and the global economic recovery, which he said is a long way off. four workers at a historic cemetery south of chicago have been charged in an alleged scheme to resell burial plots. officials say hundreds of corpses were unearthed, and it could take months to identify the remains. in pamplona, spain, this morning the first fatality at the running of the bulls in almost 15 years. a 27-year-old spaniard was killed when he was gored by a bull that separated from the pack and started charging at the runners. another man was gored and tossed into the air, but amazingly, he walked away from it. two other people were also gored, including an american who is in intensive care. tragedy thursday near detroit, where a driver apparently tried to get around a railroad crossing gate as an amtrak train was approaching. all five people in the car were killed. today, a leaner general motors emerged from bankruptcy, after being in chapter 11 for 40 days. and a big day thursday at washington's national zoo, where officials threw a panda party for tai shand's fourth birthday. the giant panda got a special cake made of bamboo and shredded beef. looks like he likes it. it's all over his face. four minutes past the hour. let's go back outside to matt and maria. so cute. >> very, cute. natalie, thank you very much. we've got al wrapping up vacation, as well. alexandra steele of the weather channel has been doing a great job. alexandra, take it away. >> a great crowd we've got here. a lot of people from minnesota, and kansas and oklahoma. all the incredible hot spots. let's take a look at the satellite and radar picture. here in the northeast for the concert on the plaza, couldn't be nicer as we look up, sunny skies, a few fair weather clouds. you can see farther to the west from minnesota down to missouri, scattered showers and storms will fire up. even the potential for an isolated tvd and some hail today. and you can see it right there. right in the red the slight risk for severe weather. to the southwest, temperatures warm, steamy in the deserts, and in the northwest, temperatures a little bit above average there. in the southeast, sunshine, and here in the mid-atlantic and in the >> the satellite radar combination, a little gray shading. in virginia, low clouds. a lot of sun in our forecasted. natalie, back to you. >> all right, thank you, alexandra. prescription drug abuse was once hollywood's dirty secret, the cat's certainly out of the bag. since michael jackson's death we're learning more about rampant abuse. dr. drew pinski is an addiction spekzist, the host of celebrity rehab with dr. drew an vh1 and co-author of the mirror effect how celebrity narcissism is seducing america. good morning. >> good morning. >> toxicology report not due back for another three to four weeks. but we've heard so much about the reported drug use that michael jackson, apparently all the drugs that he was using. bring us up to date, demerol, diprivan. >> those are opiod painkillers, highly, highly addictive. michael had a history of being addicted for opiate addiction years ago. he strugged with this for a long time and clearly had access to these things from physicians. i guess physicians, some, don't understands that when you give opiates to an opiate addict their disease is very active. >> these are powerful painkillers. diprivan is something that only is used in surgery as an anesthetic. >> the diprivan thing even caught me on guard. diprivan is something that's used in intensive care un its to keep ventilator dependent patients unconscious. it's used for anesthesia. used outside of a hospital, i have never heard of it. people say are you astonished? i've never heard of it. it's outlandish to have somebody prescribed and given that medication outside of a hospital. you can't imagine how bizarre that is. >> as an addiction expert we hear so much about the painkiller addiction. but this is not just a problem among celebrities. how prevalent is this even among our youth in america? >> that's where the really big problem is. quoting data from the national association school of nurses, 2500 12 to 17-year-olds will abuse a prescription medication for the first time to day. >> 12 to 17-year-olds? >> 2500 today in this country. one-third of high school seniors say they have used prescription drugs. it is a massive problem. think about it. we become very casual about it. everyone should open their medicine cabinet and you will find a sleeping medicine, an open yad left over from a dental procedure or something and our kids see that. they see the casual attitude. >> and that's where they're getting it? >> not the parents are negligent, we've adopted a casual attitude and we need to talk to our kids about this. >> let's talk about what's going an on as we showed an undercover report jeff rossen showed us how easy it is to get prescriptions for these powerful drugs with just having cash in hollywood. take a listen to how he used our undercover decoy and describes to jeff exactly what he was able to get. >> this is a suicide cocktail on paper. could these drugs kill me? they could kill 20 people. >> i mean, he got enough drugs to kill, as you heard, 20 people. >> yeah. >> this is pretty prevalent in hollywood celebrity culture, right? >> yes, it's prevalent everywhere, unfortunately. here's the problem. the very, very wealthy and powerful and the very, very poor have very much in common when it comes to their health care. they have trouble getting good health care. the problem is the standard of care in the health care community is the standard, because it's the best. and people that tend to become celebrities tend to think that they need special care. when you get special care, you get substandard care most of the time. doctors, you know, we have our own narcissistic liabilities ourselves and we sort of could be he is seusseddy the celebrity. >> if you're got somebody giving you cash. >> it's not even the money, it's this bigger than life person thinks i'm a good doctor. you could imagine michael jackson or somebody coming and saying you're the best doctor i ever had. only you make me feel good. oh, my goodness, i'm helping this guy. i'm paying you all this money to give me what i need, and you don't give me, i'm going to sell everybody what a horrible doctor you are. >> your reality show, celebrity rehab you treated jeff conaway known for his roles in greece and taxi and i told you as well as our reporter jeff who interviewed him once again that he could get just about anything he asked for. how did you then help him break that habit? >> we do what we do, we get them off the drugs. and in our world, about the vast majority of times the patient come in telling us on a scale of 10 their pain is 20. jeff is a chronic pain patient. just by taking them off the opiate pain medication, two weeks later they will tell us almost without exception the pain is a 4 or under. the pain actually intensifies, the opiates actually intensifies the pain and doctors aren't aware of it. peccents aren't aware of it. then we confront the addiction. even in jeff's case, we got him good treatment. we confronted it actively. you have to have the active participation of the patient and even then the outcomes are not that great. >> there have been success stories, robert downey jr., britney spears. >> britney is a great example of what happens when the people around the individual are enlightened and listen to a good team, and take their advice and do something very, very difficult. the one thing people are afraid to do is risk their access or their jobs to a celebrity. in this case, imagine this, her parents stepped up and risked their access to their daughter. can you imagine if they'd done the conservatorship and the daughter had said, britney said i'll hate you, i will never speak to you again. they did that and did it to save her life and the woman got good care. britney is alive because of it. very few celebrities that have that kind of enlightened people around them. >> is it different dealing with a celebrity working with them to try to breaked habit? >> no, the reality is it's no different. humans are humans. but the world they live in makes it more difficult to keep them engaged in the treatment process, because they do tend to be insulated from the world, tend to be surrounded by the people who give them what they want. and what celebrities often need is confrontation, frustration. >> they need people to tell them no, which they don't get. >> exactly. they don't get that. and it's very hard for physicians to do that themselves. >> all right. and last question, i mean, what can we do to try to put this problem -- >> well, i think we can really all start in our own home. that realize that these medications in our medicine cabinets are not benign. all medications -- i grew up with a physician father who raised me with the idea that all medications are dangerous. we've got to remember that and look in our medicine cabinet and talk to our kids about the potential risk of things we've come to take so casually. we start there and in my plow fegs, takes a really good look at itself as it pertains to powerful people and celebrities. in interviews with my peers i say don't attempt this alone. celebrities need teams of people around them. if they don't have that, they will run amok. >> dr. drew pinsky, as always, great to have you here. still to come this morning, another kind of addiction. shopping. we're going to tell you why you are spending your money on things you may not need, and how to stop. then later, it's going the way of "today's kitchen" for some easy gourmet treats that will go perfectly with your grilled steak. there's the life i live. and the life i want to live. fortunately, there's enbrel. enbrel can help relieve pain, stiffness, fatigue, and stop joint damage. because enbrel suppresses your immune system, it may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal, events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma and nervous system... and blood disorders have occurred. before starting enbrel, your doctor should test you for tuberculosis. also ask your doctor if you live in an area... with a greater risk for certain fungal infections. don't start enbrel if you have an infection, like the flu. tell your doctor if you're prone to infections, have cuts or 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even when we don't plan it, expect it or need it? >> it can be because in these very scary economic times it's a self-soothing mechanism. we think if i were economically secure, i would be shopping, so if i'm shopping, i must be economically secure. so it's a bit of a trap. >> and also, people who kind of self-soothe through shopping, if that's the way they make themselves feel good, then even during economically tough times, they're still going to shop, or maybe even more so, to get them to feel successful, like beautiful. whatever the case may be. >> it's the old retail therapy thing. >> absolutely, biochemically that it helps out to make you feel better. let's go then to what to prevent, how to do it in order not to keep doing that. first of all, don't buy everything in one store, which is what i did yesterday. >> yes, yes, when you buy everything in one store it becomes a bit of a free for all. you lose sight of how much you're spending. you think to yourself, i've already hit the $200 mark, what's another 20 and you throw near t-shirt into the pile. so it's -- >> yeah, i mean, there are stores sometimes you're getting a bargain, or you're getting lots of cheap things, and you can deny yourself, you can -- it's called denial. you just say oh, well this is only $20. this is $10. but the truth of the matter is, you should only be spending a dollar on a regular basis and still be a compulsive buyer. it's how you use the shopping. >> whether that really determines if you're compulsive or not. >> don't buy into bargains because the anticipation of getting a good deal drives you towards it whether you need it or not. >> how many times have we bought something that doesn't even fit that we never wanted or needed or can use, but i got it on sale. and getting the bargain is such an achievement, there's a thrill involved in that. so you have to kind of ignore it a little bit. >> right. and also we feel like we're rewarding ourselves. >> yes. >> which increases, you know, the chemicals in the brain that tell us to feel good. feel like oh, i'm being nice to myself. i'm just going to get this and everything will be okay. and of course, you know, it's a catch-22, because once you actually have the object, you lose the high. because things don't stay shiny and new indefinitely. >> another way to control the urge to overspend is to ration your willpower. and you talk about the 24-hour rule. >> yes. i have a 24-hour rule. because when in "o" we found that when you have to expend too much willpower. say you're resisting all the goodies at the food court, you run out of willpower and you're going to buy those shoes that you didn't need. i ask myself, okay, if i want those shoes 24 hours from now, i'll go back and get them. an hour later i have forgotten about them completely. >> so sometimes if you don't act impulsively, then you won't give in to getting that extra something that you don't need. and also, you may not want to bring credit cards with you if you have a compulsive buying disorder. because credit cards almost feels like play money. it's like fantasy. and you think you can afford things you really can't. >> especially don't use your credit cards if you're in a bad mood. >> oh, my goodness, yes. there was a study that showed people who were in a sad mood offered to pay 300 times more for an item than people in an okay mood. that's a lot. >> and that's where you know it's like an addiction because it really does fool around with the neurochemicals in the brain that help you to feel i'm okay. and there are certain medications that do address mood anxiety and compulsion that when people take it, they do find they're less vulnerable to this impulse to shop till you drop. >> and something for sure, when the credit card bill comes in. thank you both. coming up, one more song from the rascal flatts. but first, these messages. light & fit has 80 calories versus 100 in the other leading brand. and a taste you'll find... 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