Pop
star Whitney Houston is dead at the age of 48. While the
official cause of death has not yet been announced, she had a long
history of drug problems and was in and out of rehab over the years
and it's likely that substance abuse played some role. As USA Today
reminds us
[In 2002]she did an interview with Diane
Sawyer to promote her upcoming Just Whitney.
She admitted using drugs in the highly watched TV interview, which
included her infamous declaration, "Crack is cheap. I make too much
money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. OK? We don't do
crack. We don't do that. Crack is wack."...In a 2009 interview with Oprah
Winfrey to promote I Look To You,
Houston...confessed that she laced her marijuana with rock cocaine
and revealed that she'd spent time in rehab and had undergone an
intervention by her mother.
Here's a question for proponents of the drug war: Does
prohibition - which demonstrably fails to keep illegal drugs out of
the hands of people who want them - simply make it that much harder
for people like Houston to admit and seek problems for their
problems? Everyone knows that it's no easy thing for addicts or
problem users of anything to admit they need help. Does
criminalizing the behavior on top of everything else make it that
much harder to for such people to seek the help they need?
Here's one of Houston's signature songs: