crack is bad for you...

No, I'm not making any kind of snarky plumbers-butt joke here.

Apparently the singer Amy Winehouse has emphysema. At 24. Twenty-friggin'-four.

The doctors are relating it in part to her smoking (uh, tobacco, and then some, uh, other stuff) habits.

On the news this morning apparently someone (one of her doctors?) was quoted as saying something like, "She's going to have to decide what she loves more...being alive and able to sing, or the drugs."

And you know, that just makes me sad. I know, crack is supposed to be highly addictive. I know people have pain in their lives. But I cannot imagine someone at 24 being in that boat...I think of ME at 24, what I was like - still fairly full of hope, still kind of young and silly (I mean silly in the good way). I didn't have whatever demons seem to haunt Ms. Winehouse.

I just can't picture that level of self-destructiveness. Oh, I know people DO it, we have a long line of musicians (especially) who died young. But I still have a hard time accepting it.

I don't know. Self-destructive behavior just in general makes me sad. I can't quite imagine the kind of demons that would drive someone to find solace at the bottom of a crack pipe. (And I don't want to.)

I go back and forth on the whole drug issue, tending to be a bit of a little-l libertarian. But I do think, at times like this, that maybe the death penalty for any dealer who is shown to have gotten someone hooked - especially if that person died as a result of the addiction - might not be too harsh.

(And her family - I presume she has family? What must they be going through.)

I hope this is a wake-up call for her, I hope she can manage to kick it and to continue and to have some sort of happy life. (Somedays I wonder if there isn't something a little ghoulish about the way we treat famous people, the whole "dance monkey dance" always needing them to be "on" and the way they're always in the public eye.) I'd rather see her retire from the scene than die.