Z – Amy Winehouse – Drug Addiction – An Open Letter
An Open Letter to the Self-Rightous Nanny-Brigade who think all drug addicts need is a ‘lot’ of Love and the full support of friends and family at all costs.
While I appreciate that Amy Winehouse was an enormous talent, and apparently one of the nicest souls to be found, she did have personal problems and you can rest assured that there is absolutely ‘No-One’ out there who could have helped her.
With people like Amy, the only person who could possibly have helped was Amy herself. It sounds harsh but those are the facts. Anyone who says differently has never had a crack cocaine addict living in their house, or even had one as a friend. (A true friend).
They will lie until the cows come home, they will steal your last penny to get their next hit if they have no money themselves, and they have no social conscience which would stop a normal person behaving that way. They can also be extremely violent towards the people they love most as well.
Yes, they are remorseful ‘after’ the event, when they’ve had their hit or been found out as a bare faced liar. But living with, or to be around these people is a living nightmare if you’re not sharing that nightmare with them. Especially if there are younger members of the family around who see the deceit and the violence, who grow thinking maybe that’s quite normal.
You can give ‘all’ the love you have to these people in a futile attempt to steer them back into the world that most of us recognise as normal, but they will just usurp that love and it will evaporate for ever having served no purpose at all. The ‘only’ love they can possibly use is ‘Tough Love’. It’s the hardest love to give, but it IS the most powerful and most useful form of love.
It’s time everyone stopped using drug addicts, especially the crack cocaine addicts as some ticket to notoriety or local funding for the next hair-brained scheme that’s ‘supposedly’ going to cure these unfortunate souls.
If money IS to be spent, then spend it on getting the stuff OFF the streets. On financing properly regulated methadone programmes that don’t have every clause and hurdle in the book that actually STOPS the addicts from getting on them in the first place. If an addict identifies the problem and sees the need to get clean, they should be able to walk into their doctors and get an INSTANT referral, not have to ‘prove’ to some jumped up official who is funded by one of the above schemes, that you’ve been clean for a month first! That rather defeats the object in the first place.
The pain of coming off these drugs is unimaginable, and most of us (me included) probably wouldn’t have the strength of character or the ‘Balls’ to go through that pain. So prolonging that pain is going to put MOST addicts right off the idea and so they go back to their Comfort Zone and it’s an ever increasing vortex down into Hell!
If the death of Amy Winehouse causes the debate to be opened up FULLY again, and not in a way which serves the politicians and Do-gooders who are certainly creaming off the system, then maybe she can rest in peace wherever her spirit has gone now. (And that was SOME Spirit).
R.I.P Amy, yet another ‘Lost Soul’ who is now on her own ‘Amazing Journey’.