Winehouse: Addiction’s latest casualty

Amy Winehouse died last weekend, after a days-long binge of drinking and drugging.

We all have Amy Winehouse’s “blood on our hands,” said Dave Bidini in the Toronto National Post. When the troubled singer was found dead last week at her London home, reportedly after a days-long binge of drinking and drugging, many noted the eerie coincidence that Winehouse died at the same age, 27, as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Brian Jones. But the fact that “Club 27” is so crowded with dead rock stars is not so much a coincidence as a “fatal, self-perpetuating cliché.” Our culture glamorizes musicians who live out our teenage fantasies of rebellion, danger, and self-indulgence; we expect them to be tortured and dark, and to deal with their demons by consuming superhuman quantities of booze, pills, and cocaine. Winehouse’s big hit, “Rehab,” was about saying “no, no, no” to getting sober, and because millions thought that was funny and cool, “someone else’s daughter is going to die.”

Our culture didn’t kill Amy Winehouse, said Tanya Gold in the London Guardian. Addiction did. Hundreds of thousands of other addicts die every year, in squalor and misery, “and they are not venerated, or even pitied.” Yet we’re in “collective denial” about the extent of drug and alcohol addiction, said Tracy Shaffer in HuffingtonPost.com. It’s not openly discussed, except when the latest celebrity goes to rehab or dies or is arrested, but the truth is that we’re collectively obsessed with booze, pills, and other drugs. The next Amy Winehouse might be “your daughter, your neighbor’s son, your sister’s husband, or maybe you.” May she serve as a reminder that addiction isn’t glamorous, and that addicts need help.

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