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While they may seem to occupy far flung quadrants of the celebrity spectrum, Tom Cruise and Dr. Drew Pinsky share more than one might initially surmise. Both are charming and boyishly handsome men in their mid-to-late 40s, and both have devoted a good part of their lives to helping celebrities and non-celebrities alike overcome the various chemical dependencies preventing them from achieving their full potential as human beings. It's in the approach where they diverge, for while Pinsky employs a more traditional treatment of group therapy and close medical monitoring, Cruise instead adheres to the lesser-proven Scientological methodology of prescribed vitamins, rigorous shvitzing, and however many hundreds of auditing hours might be required to fully rid oneself of one's recreational-drug-loving thetans.

Which would all be well and good—there's more than one way to skin a once-famous cat who's lost everything to an expensive coke habit, after all—except that Pinsky has now publicly come out against Cruise. Not just his qualifications as a dependency counselor who has personally—personally!—helped hundreds of people get off drugs, but the man himself, throwing the megastar's very sanity into question in an upcoming Playboy interview. From Page Six:

In next month's Playboy, Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of VH1's "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew," says: "A lot of people in the public eye who behave strangely have mental illness we can learn from, and much of it is based on childhood trauma, without a doubt. Take a guy like Tom Cruise. Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that's a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood - maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect."

Cruise's lawyer, Bert Fields, told us: "This unqualified television performer who is obviously just looking for notoriety is so grotesquely unprofessional as to pretend to diagnose Tom and others without ever meeting them. He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill. The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels."

Certainly, Pinsky must have realized that by uttering these statements, he would be inviting a danger far greater than just a terse Scary Hollywood Lawyer statement likening him to a Nazi leader. (The very thing, it bears mentioning, his client hunts down in United Artists's upcoming historical-action-epic, Valkyrie!) It's at his own risk that he pay no mind in the coming weeks to any white vans idling outside the Pasadena Recovery Center, for it would take only seconds for the doctor to suddenly find himself staring at the inside of a pillowcase, only to wake up however many hours later shackled to the deck of the USS Asbestos somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico.