a few posts on the Amy Winehouse thread have shown some pretty misguided and callous views on the subject..

The callous I can cope with.. some people aren’t bothered about saving the rainforests.. some advocate capital punishment.. junkies are junkies.. nutters are nuts.. some people kill spiders some don’t.. fair enough..

but the view that she had a choice is a bit of a grey area I reckon..

I don’t think that anyone with first hand experience of the dark
abyss of substance abuse and addiction would be so quick to comment..

Had to vent my spleen and didn’t feel the winehouse thread was the right place although I may be being a bit precious about that.. I dunno.. 😕

You make a definite choice to take drugs, you either buy them, steal to pay for them, or try them.
YOU DONT HAVE TO, and neither should us the general public be forced to subsidise the nhs to clear up the mess they leave, in peoples lives.

You aren’t being precious at all yunki.

There are some foolish comments over on the other thread, but I think it’s ignorance rather than more unpleasant.

there’s one on this thread already.

You make a definite choice to take drugs

project.. as a rule.. it’s young kids with poor upbringings that make that choice.. usually in puberty when the hormones are raging and they don’t know their arse from their elbow.. some scrape through and others don’t.. It’s a slippery slope with the best will in the world..

It’s not grown adults we’re talking about.. otherwise I would agree..

You make a definite choice to take drugs, you either buy them, steal to pay for them, or try them.
YOU DONT HAVE TO, and neither should us the general public be forced to subsidise the nhs to clear up the mess they leave, in peoples lives.

Possibly the most small-minded, misguided thing I’ve ever read on here.

I think there is an area where the drug taking is exploited, or at the very least not discouraged. How much free advertising do the likes of Whitehouse or Doherty obtain for the record companies due to the drug taking exploits?

Yunki, i worked with adult drug abusers and they where adults,in mind and body, they saw it as getting away from all their problems.

Middle and upper clases do take drugs, but usually have the money to buy them, aso dont get caught stealing to buy the drugs to start with.

Oh and lets not forget the Drs and dentists who get addicted to drugs and are usualy forced to resign.

and neither should us the general public be forced to subsidise the nhs to clear up the mess they leave, in peoples lives.

so how is that going to be paid for?

YOU DONT HAVE TO

Are you really sheltered enough to think that it’s rational and reasonable adults (or even rational and reasonable teens) that are thinking..

‘ho hum.. today I shall embark on an adventure into the unknown.. I know the price that those around me will have to pay but damn them all to hell I fancy some fun..’

of course it’s not

I was mystified by the connection between Amy Winehouse’s death and the young dead Norwegians.

If something unpleasant happens to someone riding a bike over the weekend, will it be any less tragic because of what some headcase did in Norway ? After all, riding a bike can be dangerous as every one knows.

There are type ‘A’ personalities and there are type ‘B’. There are many other factors involved in personality, but these two are well known, well documented and easily observable in people around you, i.e. you will all be able to identify someone who is type A or B.

Type B people can take something or leave it.

Type A people have ‘addictive’ personality traits. They usually get very deeply involved with things almost to an obsessive level. They do inded get very addicted to whatever they are involved with.

I’m fortunate, I chose to get deeply addicted (to the point of obssession) about bikes. I couldn’t give them up, not even remotely. I’d go mad.

Amy Winehouse chose to get addicted to drugs and alcohol.

That was the choice, but once in that pit, it would have been extremely difficult to get out of it.

That’s the problem with type A traits. You do get addicted to things very easily. It is materially harder for a type A person to quit doing something that for a type B person.

i can understand people who say it’s the person’s fault for taking drugs e.t.c can also understand though,that when you have an addiction it is extremely difficult to stop.i had a drinking/smoking addiction which was ruining my life.would spend almost all my money on it (never stole or anything like that though) thankfully i managed to quit both (7 years ago) and will never go back.no one put a gun to my head to make me start (i take full responsibility for my actions).the other factor is what got that person to start getting addicted in the first place.it’s easy to judge e.t.c but until you get to the reason behind the addiction it just isn’t a black and white answer (hope that made some sort of sense?)

Yunki, i worked with adult drug abusers and they where adults,in mind and body, they saw it as getting away from all their problems.

They let you work with them..!? saints preserve us..

weren’t they kids when their drug problems started though..?
I will admit to knowing one junkie out of dozens that embarked on their journey of drug abuse as a responsible adult.. but that’s a statistic of like 2% maybe in my experience..

Are you telling me that the national statistic is higher than that..? I’d be absolutely gobsmacked..

and when I said poor upbringings I hope you realise that I didn’t mean financially.. I think products of a bad environment would have been more accurate..

I’m not sure people choose to become addicted any more than you people choose to be depressed. I suspect both have a genetic pre-disposition and some people are less fortunate than others in their experiences in life.

I have a few of my “friends” end up a mess because of one too many nostrils full of marching powder. Regardless of what some folk are taking they sometimes just can’t handle life.

I have taken all sorts of shite over the years and never felt the need to take it any further although at times I have had to give myself a big slap and MTFU.

Horses for courses.

If you are going to go down the path of drink and drugs then you really need to get a grip and enjoy it. IMO.

Why are you suprised when the idiots appear on these types of threads?
It’s amazing, someone has died yet they still seem to think their hideous comments should be seen.

There are type ‘A’ personalities and there are type ‘B’.

…and there are type C.

Type C are the ones who are born to parents who had no chance, or to parents who were addicts themselves. The kind of kids who don’t have toys, who don’t have presents, who don’t even have carpets at home. The kind of kids who grow into adults who never even had a chance, who’ve never had new clothes, who have never been spoken to in a friendly way, who have been seen as useless, as wasters, as a burden since the day they were born.

If you sit and read through the notes of people who get the label ‘addict’ stuck on them, you begin to see that they are people for whom the temporary release of whichever drug is available is the best they have ever felt.

In their whole life.

And for all the ‘well they have a choice’, and all the ‘they just need to pull themselves together’ and the ‘what an easy life’, not one of you would change places with them.

A bit less judging and a bit more understanding and sympathy would make all our lives a little bit better…

Well said

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.

yunki………….her choice was wether to take drugs or not take drugs.
if you choose to take drugs and die from that choice, well shit happens i suppose.

Crikey those situations you highlight happen to type a and type b people alike. Not everyone who goes through the experiences you describe ends up a drug additct. Similarly not all drug addicts come from broken or destitute homes.

Of course there are choices involved for everyone but that wasn’t really my point.

My point was actually that the experience of addiction is different for different people and some people Are more vulnerable than others; more prone to addiction than others in the same way that some people are generically predisposed to depression or mental illness.

shit happens

I agree to an extent.. but if your teenage grandkids make the same bad choices and head off down the wrong path as a result I’m sure you’ll say the same at their funerals Tony..
nice

yunki………….her choice was wether to take drugs or not take drugs.
if you choose to take drugs and die from that choice, well shit happens i suppose.

Very naïve point of view.

on the Singletrack forum people who smoke or are carrying too much weight are ridiculed but drug addicts have no choice?

god I’m dying to see where this one ends up

deviant, if any of your mates had died during the wild years, would you have been upset, or just seen it as collateral damage? I lived a similar life to you, but can’t for the life of me work out where you’re coming from.

if you choose to take drugs and die from that choice, well shit happens i suppose.

As ernie said on the other thread, cycling is also a dangerous activity. Shit happens is not my response when a cyclist is killed on the roads. I think it’s sad, same as the Winehouse thing.

Deviant; you aren’t special mate. everyone has a story or knows someone with a story like yours pretty much.

That fact is this person knew the dangers and didn’t care. Self harm is self harm, no matter what form it takes. enormous amounts of fatty foods, Prescription drugs , cutting, burning, drink, (drugs)…exhaust pipe in the car, etc etc etc. The reasons for it are profound and we in STW are in no position at all to know or comment on the reasons for it.

yunki………….her choice was wether to take drugs or not take drugs.
if you choose to take drugs and die from that choice, well shit happens i suppose.

I concur:
She had a family, she made choices and has paid the price.

yunki………….her choice was wether to take drugs or not take drugs.
if you choose to take drugs and die from that choice, well shit happens i suppose.

I concur:
She had a family, she made choices and has paid the price.

Everyone dies. I don’t understand why everyone gets so excited about risky behaviour (especially rabid here in the temple of H&S). There’s a lot to be said for dying young if you’re in show-business.

yunki, if my son, duaghter or grandaughter became a drug addict and died in the future, and were adults at the time, well they will have made the choice theirselves.
and like i said, shit happens
people like me who are fat are fat cos they eat to much, if it kills them/me nobody else is to blame.
same with drug abuse.

it’s not as black and white though ton
given the choice as to whether they take drugs or not, sometimes the alternative to not taking them is a worse choice…
I do think this is the minority though and most who take drugs have the option to say no, and should.
either way, to die because of drug abuse is never the right result

hopefully Pete Doherty will be next

Why, what terrible wrong has he done you ? ………I think we ought to know.

yunki, if my son, duaghter or grandaughter became a drug addict and died in the future, and were adults at the time, well they will have made the choice theirselves.
and like i said, shit happens
people like me who are fat are fat cos they eat to much, if it kills them/me nobody else is to blame.
same with drug abuse.

Can’t argue with that, it wasn’t a pop at you ton, I hope everything is well, more to justify what you said.

Some people really need to step down from their high horses. We’re all human, we all make mistakes.

We should bear in mind that mental ill health is on the whole, still a very misunderstood phenomena. People from the most well balanced of upbringings have life long problems quite often, sometimes people who’ve had a very troubled start manage to not be affected by it and live very untroubled adult lives.

Drink and drugs are all too easy an escape. Most people will dabble in one or the other at least once in a while to escape one problem or another. The danger lies when problems come more frequently (or constantly), and the person has an addictive type of personality.

One of the reasons I’m soooooo scared of prescription drugs even is I know I have some quite addictive personality traits. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t take drugs for the same reasons. Mountain biking I can live with though! 😉

It is not really suprising, there are quite a few people on here who have no respect for others and post up rubbish from behind the safety of their keyboards.

Sad waste of a life.

There are a few bods around on here who mention what a laugh drugs are, and some who seem to think that anyone who is against drugs is somehow uptight / obsessed with what others are up to.

A proportion of people who meddle with drugs will end up meeting this sort of end. Some people gamble, some people drink, some people drive too fast and some people ride pushbikes. There is always a proportion of people who have the kind of personality where they go for the extreme end of the spectrum.

The problem is that recreational drugs [edited] will send you to the grave pretty bloody sharpish, because they combine a) fun with b) actual addictive qualities, exacerbating any tendency to go in at the deep end.

Hopefully Winehouse will become a bloody good advert for not trying drugs out.

well said crikey

The problem is that drugs will send you to the grave pretty bloody sharpish, because they combine a) fun with b) actual addictive qualities, exacerbating any tendency to go in at the deep end.

Hopefully Winehouse will become a bloody good advert for not trying drugs out.
Hear, hear, and can we also ban penicillin cos that’ll kill me! 😕

ok.. well.. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised at the hard headedness of some folk..

I’m just a firm beleiver in walking a mile in another mans shoes before I judge.. some folk obviously have a more direct line to the answers..

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve had to overcome my own demons to the best of my abilities in the past.. and so seeing this girl die feels a bit more like losing one of my own than it does for others perhaps..

I would hope that I wouldn’t be so disrespectful were the tables turned.. tonight’s one of the few night’s that I’m glad we’re talking in a forum instead of a pub.. 😳