Losing

Adam Jasinski was arrested Saturday after showing a snitch a sock filled with oxycodone. He's been charged with attempting to sell 2,000 oxycodone pills to Todd Prough, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Prough said in the affidavit that Jasinski told him that he was using his "Big Brother" winnings to buy thousands of oxycodone pills and has been reselling them along the East Coast for the past several months. He's now facing 20 years in prison and a million-dollar fine.

But that's nothing. VH1 officials are facing the music surrounding the gruesome story of Ryan Jenkins, a good-looking rich kid from Canada they recruited for the show "Megan Loves a Millionaire." Jenkins said, "I'm so James Bond and I'm gonna rock it" for the cameras.

It turns out he was less James Bond and more Charles Manson. Days after taping two episodes for VH1 in August, Jenkins checked into a luxury ocean-side hotel in San Diego with his wife, a gorgeous model (and aspiring actress) named Jasmine Fiore. Then she was found dead -- stuffed in a bloodstained suitcase thrown into the trash. Her fingers and teeth had been removed to delay identification, but the cops found her name by the serial number on her breast implants. VH1 quickly canceled their "Millionaire" show, but this story descended further when Jenkins was found dead of a suicide, hanging by a belt from a coat rack in a run-down Canadian motel.

Obviously, this is a rather extreme case of bad character. But the ratings-hungry makers of "reality" TV, in constant search of "characters" that they can cast and even expect viewers to hate or laugh at, are working with people whose desire for recognition can override any sense of moral judgment -- and just plain common sense.

Many of these "reality" people, it turns out, weren't very good people. Imagine that.