Some troubled individuals take drugs and/or drink in order to obliterate their mind and escape from some hideous event or unpleasant reality like abuse, mental illness etc...with regard to these people then i do sympathise.
However, for the majority of drug users there is a simple choice involved.
Back in the 90s my friends and i partied hard and were regulars at the clubs and raves around at the time....we smoked hash on a daily basis and every weekend was a blur of ecstasy and amphetamine...in the summer we'd treat ourselves to the odd mushroom or LSD trip. Plenty of times we were offered crack cocaine and heroin and each time we declined the offer....simple as.
As the years passed and our interest in the music declined we just stopped taking the drugs that went hand in hand with that scene.
Later in our 20s we all experimented with cocaine, very nice it was too but **** hell its expensive....and started to interfere with grown-up things like careers, mortgages etc...so we stopped.
Same for a little dalliance we had with opiates in the mild form of prescription Tramadol...pleasant but none of us were interested in taking it further and going down the morphine or heroin route.
As a group of friends we're all very averagely educated individuals from typical semi-detached suburban homes in the south east...2.4 children type families, no demons to run from etc....for us (and i'm sure thousands like us) drug use has been a choice.
Now in our 30s none of us indulge any more and a few pints at the weekend is about as extreme as things get these days.
For somebody like Winehouse who is supposedly from a decent background with no horrors in her past that she needs to escape from, then i also take the (albeit callous) view that she chose to immerse herself in this life and could've got out if she'd wanted to....hopefully Pete Doherty will be next.
