I was responding to a post at instablogs.com about the British musician Amy Winehouse and how she has developed emphysema at the ripe old age of 24. Someone said "Drugs suck". I said (in response): "People suck. Drugs are just chemicals."
Sure there's nothing heftily profound there but it's true. It is Amy's own responsibility what she has done to herself. Take a look at her before she got messed up on drugs:
- then after she got all fucked up on drugs:
That's got to be a case in point against excess in enjoying one's self with chemical stimulation. She was beautiful once and now drugs have taken that away and anything short of a double lung transplant will see her eventually suffocate from emphysema from all the drugs/chemicals she has smoked. Sure, that's hardly a flattering shot of her when the one at the top of this post could be used to show her at her peak on drugs also but there is a certain honesty in the last image, a certain frank and naked truth to the effect these chemicals have on a person. The drugs have this effect but the person chooses to take the drugs. The drugs are just chemicals. People make the decision and thus, if anything in this equation sucks, it is people.
Tragic.
4 comments:
And yet, despite all this, she is all over the media here in the UK.
That sort of image is heavily promoted in the press as well as on TV, and she has effectively become an unfortunate role model for unfortunate teenagers with an unfortunate present and possibly an even more unfortunate future.
You are right, it's not drugs but people and likewise people's tendency to emulate other people's bad habits, all too effortlessly.
In fact, it's all part of this social emphysema that has been plaguing young people for some time now.
I think the before and after pics hit the point home. Sad.
Yeah, it's a pity that the role models that kids aspire to are often these lost causes. Any blame to be apportioned would have to lie with the music and the fashion industry, with the advertising and marketing executives pulling the strings of image and influence.
Amy Winehouse may well end up dead from an OD or something. Then she will be immortalised as a cultural hero and icon to aspire to. How many lives were all fucked up by emulating a Hendrix or a Joplin when the sad souls doing the emulation and aspiring in this way never realised that it was precisely because the great cultural heroes were not copying anyone that they were so great.
Something could be said for religious heroes here too, and I would, but it is a dangerous ocean to navigate at the best of times and these, unfortunately, are not the best of times...
http://www.drugfree.org/Portal/DrugIssue/MethResources/faces/index.html
Hideous.
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