Whitefish Bay Native Uses Acting Career to Help Young Addicts

After growing up in Whitefish Bay, Kristen Johnston went on to pursue her dream of acting and eventually became a household name through her role in NBC's expired Third Rock From the Sun.

Johnston, who has also starred in various Broadway productions and most recently in TV Land's The Exes, also discovered drugs and alcohol along the way. Her path of addiction is documented in her new memoir, "Guts," which she discussed in an interview with The New York Times.

“I’m revealing something by choice, not by need," she told the Times. "And I think that’s important, because then more people can do it. I just want the honesty to be O.K.”

Johnston is also the founder and executive director of a group called SLAM (Sobriety, Learning and Motivation), which is trying to launch New York’s first addiction-recovery high school. She told the Times that one in three American teenagers meets the medical criteria for addiction, and with help from a recovery high school, 70 percent of them will graduate clean and sober.

“The fact that there are 25 of these schools across the country and that New York doesn’t have one,” Johnston told the Times, “is just such a wrong.”

She and her partner in the effort hope to have a recovery school open by fall 2013.