At age 14 I smoked my first cigarette. I was 15 when I got drunk for the first time. And before I graduated high school I snorted my first line of cocaine.

All things considered, by the time I entered college I was neck-deep in addiction, half-living my freshman year in an often-altered state.

As a result, I was ordered to attend an outpatient rehab program where, once a week, I begrudgingly admitted to a group of strangers that my poor choices had swallowed me whole. Well before my 20th birthday.

To say that my parents, who, despite my quiet, narcotic revolt raised me well enough to know the difference between right and very, very wrong — were livid is like suggesting that Donald Trump is humble. Similar to The Donald’s vapid vanity, my parents spit fury over my outcome. All their attempts to raise a good son, it seemed, had turned out vodka-soaked, lying smile-to-tile on a bathroom floor. They felt they had failed. And if I were the kind of person who blamed others for my dreadfully adult decisions, they might have.

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But I’m not, and they didn’t.

It was my fault — and my fault alone — that I fell face-first into the entrapments of adolescence. I knew that inhaling with certain force a powdery poison wasn’t the deftest of decisions. Neither was ingesting any of the other toxins I eagerly ate. I wasn’t proud of my choices back then, nor did they make me cool — the latter being the driving incentive of my experimentation.

That’s why I’m aghast at the current state of celebrity culture — wherein young, influential stars consume drugs and alcohol akin to characters in an early Bret Easton Ellis novel. You know who I’m talking about — the Britneys and Lindsays of the entertainment industry who seem to have no regard for consequence, flitting to and from posh rehab facilities whenever they need a nap.

With their in-and-out antics, these supposed “role models” are promoting rehab as a resort, a place you go to “get away from it all.” I fear that those who look up to these haphazard hacks — your children — will adopt a parallel perception, which effectively translates drug use and the need for treatment into attention.

Because of such errant actions, those fallen stars are sending mass messages that drinking irresponsibly and using drugs is ordinary behavior that is defensible due to stressful lives. It’s a crock. They do it because they can, because they have massive amounts of money to blow, because they want to keep their mugs on the covers of mags. They do it because somewhere between their world and the real one, they’ve lost touch with how things work, convincing themselves that they’re above the law because they are who they are.

None of it is inaccurate. Like Hollywood itself, it’s all masked by an intricate smoke screen.

Anyone who’s been to treatment will tell you that rehab is a world away from what Promises promises. There’s no silica spa, and Wolfgang Puck doesn’t provide lunch. “Regular” rehab is a no-frills establishment comprised of patients — indulgent, odious wasters — who personify rock bottom.

That means — because of the divide that’s been created by Brit, LaLinds and others like them (Howie Day, Richie Sambora, Pete Doherty — take your pick) between how rehab is administered to the rich and famous, and the rest of us — you have a potential problem on your hands.

Your kids are growing up with visions of addiction as glamour — that it’s an adverse state of affairs to be treated with shopping sprees and Swedish massages. Perhaps that’s true for those who have it all. But for the rest of us, the ones whose problems aren’t rewarded by lucrative endorsement deals and high-profile starring roles, well, we’re left out to dry.

Often — especially after discovering that sticking things up our noses that don’t belong there doesn’t ensure the kind of attention we want — we end up statistics that spiral so far out of control that no one is willing to help us. Or even care that we’re killing ourselves to begin with.

It’s an irony far removed from that Hollywood ending we were after in the first place.

Michael A. Knipp is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and the founder of Line/Byline Communications. He can be reached at michael.knipp@gmail.com.