Douglas gets five years for drug dealing

A NEW YORK judge has sentenced actor Michael Douglas’s son to five years in prison on drug charges, calling it his “last chance to make it”.

Federal Judge Richard Berman announced the sentence after hearing Cameron Douglas apologise and admit he had squandered a lot of opportunities to turn his life around.

He had pleaded guilty in January to a drug charge that carries a mandatory 10 years in prison, but his lawyers – and his father in a candid court plea – argued for less time.

The troubled 31-year- old son of the Academy Award-winning actor admitted to dealing methamphetamine and cocaine.

The sentencing followed a plea for leniency by Michael Douglas, who said his family’s fame and history of substance abuse helped drive his troubled son into drug addiction and crime.

“I love my son, but I’m not blind to his actions... I don’t want to see him break,” the actor told the US federal judge in a handwritten letter made public last night.

The five-page letter joined others written to the court by Cameron Douglas’s high-profile supporters, including grandfather Kirk Douglas, stepmother Catherine Zeta- Jones and NBA executive Pat Riley.

In his letter, Douglas painted his son’s problems as the product, in part, of a privileged but difficult childhood, a family legacy of drug and alcohol problems and the long shadow cast by a family of screen icons.

“I have some idea of the pressure of finding your own identity with a famous father,” wrote Douglas, who starred in Wall Street and whose father Kirk starred in Spartacus.

“I’m not sure I can comprehend it with two generations to deal with.”

As the only child of a “bad marriage” between an often absent Michael Douglas and his first wife, Diandra, “Cameron found his family in the gang mentality”, his father wrote.

He said his son developed a substance abuse problem at 13, played truant at school and refused rehab unless it was legally required.

Cameron Douglas eventually found some success as a club DJ and got some movie roles, including one in 2003’s It Runs in the Family, starring his father and grandfather.

But he spiralled into a heroin addiction and, according to his lawyers, began dealing meth in 2006 to support himself after being cut off from the family fortune because he wouldn’t get treatment.

Michael Douglas pointed to relatives’ drug and alcohol problems.

Douglas said he was treated at an Arizona clinic for alcohol abuse in the 1990s. His half-brother, Eric Douglas, died in 2004 of an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription pills.

Cameron’s stepmother Zeta-Jones earlier said: “My stepson is a caring, considerate, worthy human being, but nevertheless the disease that he has for years tried to combat did take over again.”