Drugs & Responsibility
Cats: Politics, Current Events|Avid readers of this blog can attest to the fact that I don’t get into the celebrity worship very often here. (If I did, there’d be a ‘celebrity’ tag). However, watching E! news this morning has prompted me to address a certain celebrity issue from my high horse that is this blog.
Of course, everyone not living in a cave for the past year knows (and doesn’t particularly care) that Anna Nicole Smith died of a dangerous prescription drug cocktail, which her lawyer/lover was apparently procuring for her. And Heath Ledger more recently fell victim to a similar death from a similar cocktail. Now law enforcement is looking into whether Britney Spears is or has been drugged in a similar fashion by her former manager who was throwing parties at Britney’s house while she was in rehab & the hospital. Big surprise, given her erratic behavior as of late.
But the reason I’m writing this post is to remind those who have grown accustomed to some level of celebrity that IT’S YOUR LIFE AND YOUR BODY!!! I don’t care who you trust (and given what I know about celebrity — vicariously, of course — you should trust no one very much when you’re famous); when someone is offering you alcohol or illegal or prescription or over-the-counter drugs, the first thing you should say is ‘no’. The second thing you should do is go (not have one of your people do it for you) to a doctor of your own choosing and make sure you need it. Now I’m no doctor, but common sense tells me that if the doctor’s unbiased and worth his or her license, they should tell you a) alcohol in moderation is okay as long as you’re not addicted, b) illegal drugs are illegal for a reason and should be avoided (at the very least to avoid run-ins with the law), c) don’t take prescription drugs from someone who’s not a doctor and hasn’t personally examined you and your medical history without bias, and d) only take OTC meds for their intended purpose, and be sure to read the warnings and instructions on the label.
I want to know at what point people who become famous stop trusting their own judgment and begin to trust completely in a single manager, lawyer, lover, or other person so much that they neglect to look out for themselves at all. Trust is generally a good thing among people, but between Billy Joel’s manager spending all his piano man money, and all these recent examples of actual or potential exploitation using legal or illegal drugs, you would find me completely trusting very few people if I ever became famous. Even those on my ‘Trust’ list wouldn’t stay there long if they offered me Oxycontin, Xanax, or whatever else comes down the pike.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 am
I wanted to put ‘IT’S YOUR LIFE AND YOUR BODY, AND YOU NEED IT NOW!’ in homage to a certain corporate purchaser of structured settlements who advertises on TV all the damn time…