Panel Finds Fault with Celebrity Addicts

The International Narcotics Control Board , a U.N. watchdog agency, “declares war on ‘Celebrity ‘Endorsement’ of Drug-Related Lifestyles.’ ”

In characteristically earnest and clunky prose, the report declares war on “Celebrity ‘Endorsement’ of Drug-Related Lifestyles.”
For all those who would ordinarily never make it to page 3 of the report, the warning was reiterated at a news conference today in London. Decrying a tendency for the authorities to handle boldface-named substance abusers with kid gloves, the report’s primary author, Hamid Ghodse, told reporters, “There should not be any difference between a celebrity who is breaking the law and non-celebrities,” according to Agence France-Presse. “Not only does it give the wrong messages to young people, who are often quite impressionable, but the wider public become cynical about the responses to drug offenders.”

According to the article, it’s highly likely this report was spurred on by Amy Winehouse’s song that tells of her refusal to seek addiction treatment. They believe that celebrities, such as Winehouse, are clearly endorsing the party-hard lifestyle and that young people are going to start taking up drugs again.

That’s lovely that they’re taking a stand against celebrity endorsement of this crap. But teens getting high is not a new thing. And it doesn’t take a star to drive the kids to smoking/popping/snorting their lives away. The biggest driving force behind all of this is peer pressure. The “cool” kids – the ones with the home issues, no doubt- are still doing it and still encouraging their friends to do it right along with them. The drugs may be changing a little here and there, but the concept is the same.

The article above references a quote by Republican presidential nominee, John McCain.

[...]The man who just clinched the Republican nomination for president also addressed the drug-abuse problem this week, saying that American citizens need to stop creating a demand for illegal drugs.
“Now maybe we ought to go back to — remember when Nancy Reagan used to have a program called ‘Just Say No’ and it had some effect?” he said, according to CBS News.

Really? We just need to stop demanding them and they’ll stop coming? That statement is so ludicrous that I had to go to CBS News to see it in context. Surely there was more substance to this discussion, I thought.

I was wrong.

“Now maybe we ought to go back to – remember when Nancy Reagan used to have a program called ‘Just Say No’ and it had some effect?”

“But we also in my view need to do a lot of things, including first time drug offenders, not dealers, ought to be given a chance to rehab. In Arizona we have a program, and if you’re a first time drug offender and you go through a rehab program, that’s very long and very intensive and has drug testing along with it that we ought to give people that opportunity, but we’ve got to educate our kids as to the dangers and the evils of the use of drugs, and we probably have to use, do a better job of it,” McCain added.

I don’t know who writes for McCain, but they really need to become more inventive. Does he even realize that these programs are already running in most, if not all, states? Does he think that we, the adults, don’t already know that education was touted before as the key? His wife seems to have recovered quite nicely from her own addiction, so he doesn’t have any more sage advice- he being the one with all the “experience” afterall?

Apparently not.

There is plenty of education out there. There’s the little pep talks in all of the schools. Responsible parents warn their children from the time they’re toddlers to “just say no”. Of course, many of these responsible parents are on one kind of prescribed drug or another, but that’s not the point. We do try to steer our kids in the right direction. But it’s not people like Amy Winehouse and Paris Hilton that worry us.

It’s the kids in their school. The people that have their ear and who they want to impress. They’re peers. I personally think it’s time to find a new approach to preventing illegal drug abuse. These little pep programs and harshly worded world reports aren’t doing a thing for the kid on the street.

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