To Folks Who Condemn Addicts on Moral Grounds

There is a fatal disease called drug addiction. Millions of people have it, and millions seek help --many working hard enough and being blessed enough to begin successful recovery.

Many are unsuccessful.

Many people who battle this addiction (some prefer to call "demons") have creativity, artist expression and beauty as their raisin d'etre. The fact that as show-biz celebrities and "stars" they are venerated and awarded with financial success (extremely--Whitney was truly one of the greatest singers of all time in that world, if these detractors are capable of appreciating), is often fleeting as is most else when the disease is unrelenting and defeating. It's reported that Whitney Houston was financially--and I suspect also physically and spiritually--  bankrupt.


 It is an insidious disease. It's cunning and baffling. Look it up.

Many here and elsewhere are quick to condemn addicts on moral grounds which is brazenly naive, utterly ignorant. There are some who are offended by an outpouring of sympathy, grief, appreciation and adulation for an artist or personality who meets an untimely end which they consider self-inflicted. I cringe at and recoil from those relatively talentless and much less than admirable personalities whom we collectively hoist to the pedestal.

But we should better mind and consider that this disease discriminates even less. It doesn't discriminate at all. 


With all that considered, addiction and self-destructive behavior, albeit collaterally pervasive for the family, friends and associates of the sufferer, is not as abjectly and outrightly destructive as that of so many others' whom we admire, pardon and emulate.


~JC