Winehouse: Addiction’s latest casualty

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.

Winehouse had all the help in the world, said Sophie Heawood in the London Independent. “She just couldn’t quite accept it.” Her record company, family, and friends all begged her to get treatment, and Winehouse spent time in some of the finest addiction clinics around the world. But she was consumed with feelings of worthlessness, and kept returning to booze and crack. In the end, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com, we need to accept the fact that Winehouse got what she wanted: oblivion. When an addict ends treatment and picks up the needle or a bottle, he or she is effectively choosing death, and “we have to respect that decision even as we mourn the loss of a brilliantly original artist.”

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