Some thoughts on addiction

It's all there in the reportage. Drugs and alcohol. Was there ever a more commonplace tautology? You'll find it amongst the exhortations of doctors, scientists, commentators and politicians. But that nonsensical couplet says more about our collective relationship with the bottle than any properly formulated sentence, any government advertisement, any academic preachment.

It is, of course, more than just a drug. It is the drug of choice for humankind, one so ubiquitous and entwined in the social fabric that it is considered abnormal - even suspicious - to reject it. It is a drug which we advertise, flaunt, encourage, eulogize, celebrate, worship. 


We pour another glass for each other. Go on - finish it off. We tell stories with that special line - I was so drunk - always said with a naughty, knowing smile. As young people we dial it up to eleven, empyting bottles and lumpy bags in to friends' mouths, performing tricks with straws and funnels and hosepipes, all to a chorus of slurry, singsong encouragement.

We're all enablers, really, until the point where it would be unthinkable to enable any more.

At the end of this cruel week a 27-year-old singer and a 40-year-old writer are dead. Both were flooded with talent before they were flooded with booze. Both progressed assuredly and inevitably to the harder stuff, the stuff of jittery injections and burning nostrils.

Amy Winehouse and Sean Hoare continued a dismaying tradition of the premature destruction of musicians and writers - lost to the achilles heel of the creative class. 

And both, tragically, were nudged and egged toward this end by circumstances masquerading as opportunities. The cold edge of fame exacerbated, not initiated, Winehouse's afflictions as much as her hopeless and intractable love for Blake Fiedler-Civil. The already sizeable ranks of the "27 Club" tell us all we need to know about the commonality of this sad parable among creative geniuses.

Dispatched to the clubs of London and Ibiza to ingratiate himself with such types was Hoare, entertainment reporter for News of the World and before that The Sun. It was the company paycheque which secured the mountains of cocaine and the rivers of liquor, far too much and too frequent for the human body to withstand. But it was the only way - or at least the easiest way - to get the scoop. 


This tribute at The Guardian gives great insight in to the sloshy reality between the lines. The Winehouse eulogies are everywhere, perhaps none more poignantly put than Russell Brand's.


It's the sort of speech I hope I'll never have to give, thoughts I hope I'll never have to entertain. But I have the great pleasure of knowing some brilliant, complicated, troubled people who show all the haunting signs of addiction waiting in the wings. And it's a bottle that's certainly not out of my reach either.

Whitney Houston once declared herself too rich to do crack, perhaps true in the abstract but not in reality. There is no such thing as too rich for addiction, nor too smart, too grounded, too promising. Indeed it may feast upon those very attributes.