Michael Douglas has had an unbearably hard life, what with those millions of dollars and his startlingly young wife.

But it’s just got worse. Now that he’s been charged with selling thousands of dollars of methamphetamine, Michael Douglas’ son Cameron Douglas is facing life in jail. And by life we mean Cameron’s life, not Michael’s life. The latter would have been a much shorter sentence, because Michael Douglas is quite old.

Anyway, Michael Douglas is upset. It’s just like his movie Disclosure, but with drugs and jail and parental disappointment instead of Demi Moore with a wide-on.

We feel impossibly sorry for Michael Douglas at the moment. Not because his advanced age leaves him particularly vulnerable to swine flu, or because he’s developing a fairly conspicuous wattle of loose skin under his chin – although we do feel slightly sorry for those things too – but because he must be feeling like an especially lousy parent at the moment.

No parent likes to think that they’ve raised their children badly, so this week’s news about Michael Douglas’ 30-year-old son Cameron Douglas will have hit Michael hard. It’s not so much that Cameron could be facing life imprisonment as a result of his alleged drug dealing – more the fact that Cameron is a colossal moron.

Everyone can remember the day that their father sat them down and told them that, if they want to smuggle a small amount of drugs in or out of a country, they should use a tube of toothpaste. That’s basic, kindergarten-level drug smuggling. But Cameron Douglas? Oh no, he just got moved from home detention into jail because his girlfriend was caught trying to smuggle heroin to him in a toothbrush. Again, that’s a toothbrush. Idiot.

And that’s why Michael Douglas is so heartbroken about his son. That and probably the life imprisonment thing too, if we’re honest. In a statement to People, Michael Douglas and his ex-wife said:

“The family is devastated and very disappointed in Cameron’s recent behavior. Any family who has dealt with substance abuse knows how devastating it can be.”

But as devastated as he understandably is, it’s important that Michael Douglas doesn’t blame himself for any of this. He’s been an upstanding figure of moral authority for the duration of Cameron’s life, and there isn’t anything he could have done to avoid this. Admittedly he could have laid off the booze a bit in the late 1980s, because that would have stopped him from going to rehab when Cameron was about nine years years old.

And, looking back, spending the majority of Cameron’s childhood making a series of movies where he had sex with Sharon Stone a lot, had sex with Glenn Close a lot, had sex with Demi Moore a lot and had sex with Kathleen Turner a lot seems like the quickest way to get him bullied at school and cause him to go off the rails. And let’s not even get started about the way that Michael Douglas married a woman much closer to Cameron’s age than his own.

But other than that, there’s nothing that Michael Douglas could have done.

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