The changing face of celebrity?
Yet again, the ‘celebrity drug culture’ is in the news.
Jurors should be allowed to decide if celebrities caught on camera snorting white powder were taking illegal drugs, the Met police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, claims.
Blair referred to a recent case when Kate Moss was pictured in a newspaper snorting lines of white powder but no charges were brought. Jurors should be allowed to decide if suspects were taking illegal substances, he told the London Evening Standard. (Guardian)
It’s a story that’s frequently in the papers. Moss, Doherty, Winehouse… the ‘drug taking’ celebrity. People are almost lining up to condemn their behaviour. And yes, I agree - it’s not respectable, they’re not using their profile to behave as role models. I was glad when Doherty was eventually sent to prison, it showed clearly that his antics were wrong.
What annoys me though is that it’s often seen as something new. Pete Doherty is inadvertently an ‘ambassador’ for Britain’s youth in the 21st century - always drunk, frequently high on drugs. People suggest boycotting their products - Amy Winehouse’s own family asking people not to buy her music.
Nonsense.
If the Beatles hadn’t dabbled with drugs, we wouldn’t be able to listen to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and other legendary pieces. Status Quo without the associated lifestyle wouldn’t have been quite the same.
A very interesting article on the BBC Magazine looks back at the antics of Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, and other ‘hellraisers’ of that era. Robert Sellers has recently authored a book looking at them:
“We look back with rose-tinted glasses because they were guilty of some very unpalatable behaviour yet they achieved mythical status.
“Not many people saw them paralytic and drunk like we do today with Amy Winehouse. The 24-hour media wasn’t around in the 60s.”
Richard Burton would throw up in the foyers of hotels, but if top stars did that now, he says, someone would be there with a mobile phone to take a picture.
Most of their antics - like O’Toole going for a drink in Paris and waking up in Corsica, or Richard Burton downing 48 shots of whisky on a film set - were reported years later.
Talk about hitting the nail on the head. Yes, I think that drugs have got ‘harder’ in recent years - I don’t know of any stories of Richard Harris snorting lines of coke - but that’s society changing generally. I’d say that celebrities are just as much as hell raisers as previously. What’s changed isn’t the face of celebrity; but the projection of it.
Going back to Ian Blair’s comments then. Illegal drug use should be prosecuted where it can. However, it is being so - otherwise Pete Doherty wouldn’t have gone to jail. I’m on the side of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald. The law in the UK (so far) isn’t totalitarian. People can only be sent to jail if there’s no reasonable doubt that they committed a criminal act. I don’t think anyone would want that to change (excepting issues of detention before charge - that’s a different can of worms entirely). It’s “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer“, as William Blackstone stated. Sir Ken thinks that Sir Ian has completely got the wrong end of the stick.
“I’m extremely surprised by comments attributed to Sir Ian Blair. If he is accurately quoted he appears to have completely misunderstood the law.
“The issue was not whether the white powder that Kate Moss was snorting was cocaine or talcum powder. The law required us to prove that it was either a class A drug or a class B drug. We could only base our case on one of these options.
“It was impossible for us to do this since cocaine - a class A drug - and amphetamine - a class B drug are both white powders.” (The Telegraph)
We must investigate all allegations of celebrity drug abuse (or other criminal matters). But not at the expense of the rule of the law. And we also must be aware that they’re in the public eye - and their indiscretions are now more public. Therefore, we also shouldn’t victimise them. It’s certainly nothing that new…
~ Asp
