Mood:
blueNow Playing: thoughtfully...
Topic: News Views
THE SUN NEWSPAPER, not always a bastion of open-minded thinking in times past, published a remarkable editorial this morning.
Under the banner, "The Sun Says"... "Deadly Craving".
The five women murdered were all prostitutes.
But they can't be dismissed as tarts who asked for all that they got.
... All five were somebody's little girl.
Addiction drove them to risk everything. They craved drugs more than life itself.
The most poignant image... of this horrific saga was a terrified girl starting her night shift...
"I know the risk but I need the money," she said.
A few hours later, Paula Clennell, 24, was dead.
If there is a lesson it can be summed up by her distraught Dad, Brian: "Don't do drugs."
The press is full of sad tales of these girls who, as the cliché says, "had everything going for them" until drugs stole it all away.
I feel so sad reading these stories of girls not that much younger than me, how drugs came into their lives — and the resulting decline and fall.
As a heroin addict I've got used to living an existence I can't expect the outside world to understand.
So when something truly awful happens like this I'm suddenly confronted by realities that from day to day I've almost managed to forget.
Because drug-taking (hard drugs, anyway) is about forgetting.
And remembering feels sometimes almost too painful.
What else can I say? My thoughts aren't so much with those girls' families as with the girls themselves.
Because I know that, put in the same situation, I'd be dead also.
