Katherine Jenkins, drugs, addiction and hubris

Yet another article about drugs appeared in the glossy supplement this weekend. This time three women spoke about their addictions. One had been addicted to pain killers, another to coke and the third to cannabis and ecstacy. All were, to all intents and purposes, 'successful women.' The former two are now 'rehabilitated'; the other is still addicted, unable to pass one day without a spliff.

On the same day is the Katherine Jenkins story, a disingenuous piece about her having lied to a journalist some weeks before her having signed a multi-million dollar deal with Warners USA. Having been asked by the journalist whether she'd ever used drugs, she answered in the negative. "Now," she states, tremulously, "I want to come clean about this". Sorry about the pun. I think that they call this 'damage limitation.' She was never a heavy user, she states. Just a few lines of coke at home with friends, or in the loo at a club; or some of the old meta-amphetamines or a cake of hash. She never 'smoked' it, she says, as if that makes it better.

Tomorrow night on tv there's yet another documentary, 'Mum loves drugs, Not me.' This a week or so after Hannah's exploits with heroin were shown for all to see. And we see more of Amy, Kerry and Kate.

What does this say about our society? That it's awash with drugs? That no one has the moral fibre to say 'No' if others around are skinning up or drawing white lines on table tops or toilets or cooking with unusual ingredients? Katherine Jenkins hopes that having disclosed her drug abuse while she was a student, she can now present as a poor wayward child who was misled. How could she know, she asks, eyelids fluttering, that she would ever be this successful? How was she to know that the consequence of success means that there are only too many 'friends' who will be delighted to spill the beans about her forays into mind numbing and illegal happiness and ride on the coat-tails of her celebrity?

Oh, I know that I can't talk. I've lived with an addict and know full well what addiction is and I'm pretty sick of it all. I just wish that there were some cohesive messages in all this but there's not. Katherine Jenkins comes 'clean' about her drugs use because it suits her, not because there's any advice that maybe what she did was not advisable for anyone. She said that she didn't want to be like Amy. Well, who does? She says that the drugs made her depressed. I'm sure that they did but would any of this have come out were she not now the beneficiary of this huge recording contract?