Friday, 20 September 2024

The Message Should Be Drug's Kill

It seems with all too much frequency we hear about another life of a famous person snuffed out far too young and recently we had Matthew Perry who died from the effects of Ketamine but despite from a brief mention of his drug addiction in passing, the focus was on his career and his life.
It was the same with Michael Jackson, Prince, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston who all died from a drug overdose where their drug addiction was barely mentioned but it should be mentioned because  
all were talented individuals with a reach who could have helped raise awareness of addiction in the same way that Rock Hudson's and Freddie Mercury's deaths raised it for AIDS and Michael J. Fox in Parkinson's disease.
The death of a high profile celebrity from drugs could be a powerful tool in the warning that taking drugs can be addictive and fatal, a lesson that needs repeating constantly as drug overdose rates have more than tripled since 1999, claiming a life somewhere every 14 minutes.
The media must take its lump's that it has helped to create a culture that drugs are 'cool' and what our heroes are doing so we should be doing what we can to reverse that and highlighting the pathetic way the famous die for their addiction, Houston and Perry in their bathtubs, Prince slumped in an elevator, Jackson alone in his bed and the ultimate Elvis whose drug addled body was found dead on his toilet floor.
The senseless death of anyone is undoubtedly a cause for mourning but all of the above was just another person lost to an epidemic that kills more than 3,000 per month but the emphasis should be on the addiction and the pathetic death because otherwise their will always be a ready replacement to them and we will be reading and hearing about more pitiful deaths in the future.

1 comment:

Not really a blog said...

the press and media are totally culpable because since circa 1965, the press have felt driven to inflict the comfortable and that meant attacking "the establishment". when you destroy the aspects of society that impose constraint on bad behaviors and call them racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, etc. in the process, you take the risk of enabling bad behaviors.

thanks, now drugs and the associated crime they generate, and the adjacent crime they cohabit with (prostitution, pornography, human trafficking, counterfeiting, etc.) are a serious problem in every American town an city.

the various mafias thank you