When ever a celebrity’s “issues” are being described as dependency on prescription drugs I think of this. This is a small cut n paste, email in profile if you want to read the whole article.
The Clean Kill
Ready to do some entirely hypothetical imagining?
Let’s pretend that you are a famous media personality. The exact particulars of your job are unimportant for our purposes, so let’s just say you are well known – both as a name and as a face. You enjoy your job, the public seems to like you and your bosses are extremely happy with your annual performance. You’re not overexposed, you’re not under-utilised. You work your niche perfectly and you look, pretty much, to be set for life.
The only problem is you’re mad into coke.
This isn’t a little weekends-and-high-holidays habit. It’s not really that you take a connoisseur’s interest in it either. You just love the stuff, plain and simple. With friends. Alone. With drinks. Without. Afternoon. Evening. Night. You can’t get enough of it.
It’s a problem. Not just in terms of your own well-being, but in terms of your career prospects too – because guess what? You’ve got sloppy. The press have been tipped off to your prodigious intake and they’ve had people staked outside your flat for weeks now, documenting every time your dealer arrives.
They have pictures. They have people prepared to offer up quotes. They have all the evidence they need to get this past their in-house lawyers, and they’re ready to print.
If they push the button on this, it will cause you some serious headaches. There are very few brands or companies that can afford to keep their ties to a documented drug user unsevered – and the bigger and brighter a star you are, the greater the pressure they’ll be under to distance themselves from you, for even the most minor transgression.
So what do you do? You can’t afford another injunction. You can’t cross your fingers and hope it’ll go away. What other choice do you have?
Your best bet in this sort of situation is to confront the people who have a gun to your head – and offer to slit your own throat instead.
This is how the Clean Kill work.
You agree to go on the record. You agree to give quotes, and pictures, and, most importantly, your word that this will all stay exclusive. This is really all that they’re after – so, in exchange for that, the journalists will then afford you some artistic control on the direction their story takes.
For example, rather than framing the story around drugs that are illegal to obtain, you might be able to persuade them to focus more keenly on the sorts of drugs you can legally possess instead. Like alcohol, for instance. Or prescription painkillers. Or bath salts.
This will prevent anyone dwelling too much on the potential criminality of your behaviour, and it gives any companies, charities or other organisations with whom you do business the leeway to spare your contract.
It will also save the tabloids from having to take too moralistic a stand about cocaine – the way they would have to when the story hinges around Kate Moss taking it, or Tulisa trying to procure some for someone else.
YT by Alpine160[/url], on Flickr
