The world may never get over the death of Whitney Houston. Four years after she accidentally drowned in a bathtub, stories about the pop diva’s long-term addiction to drugs and all the strange and sad behavior that came along with it are still surfacing. Though tragic celebrity drug deaths are a dime a dozen these days, for some reason we are still interested in Whitney. The recent release of her former husband Bobby Brown’s new memoir, Every Little Step, has the public thirsty yet again for more details of Houston’s double life. Is this just because it’s Whitney, our once reigning pop princess whose fresh-face and powerful voice won us over with G-rated lyrics about love and innocence? Or is it because we continue to be mystified by the unpredictability of addiction?
A 20-Year Addiction
In her 2013 book, Remembering Whitney, Cissy Houston, recalls an awful day in 2005 when she arrived at her daughter’s house to find her in the midst of some kind of drug-induced psychosis. According to Bobby Brown in a recent interview on 2020 with Robyn Roberts, this was 13 years after he saw Whitney do drugs for the first time—cocaine at their wedding in 1992. Since we know that Houston continued to abuse drugs for another seven years until her death in 2012 (despite consequences to her health, public image, career and family), it’s safe to say that the singer maintained an ongoing and progressive habit for at least 20 years. So while some might feel that her death at 48 years old was premature, for a druggie, Houston actually lived a long, long life. For me, this begs the question: why wasn’t she ever able to get clean?
Of course, I sort of know the answer to this. It’s the reason so many people aren’t able to get sober: because it takes a lot more than a desire to stop using drugs or alcohol (though that is the first step). Sobriety takes trust—a lot of it—which most addicts have a really hard time with. I can imagine that being on the track to stardom at such an early age could seriously arrest ones ability to know who they can trust. Sobriety also requires honesty and the ability to be 100% truthful with yourself and the people around you, which isn’t something everyone can do. But most of all, sobriety takes a willingness to go to any lengths to stay clean—even if it means risking the loss of those things you have worked really hard for and dedicated your life to—if those things are standing in the way of your well-being.
Trust, Honesty and Hitting Bottom
All of this had to be hard for someone as accomplished as Whitney Houston. Since she used for so long, she may have believed she couldn’t exist without drugs. Some celebrities are “lucky” enough to have the consequences of their addiction force their hand into sobriety, with too much destruction around them to deny that things are out of control. But that didn’t seem to be the case with Whitney. Indeed, there were incidents and brief trouble with the law, but ultimately Houston never paid any immediate price for her using—that is, until February 11, 2012.
By no means is any of this a “reason” why Whitney Houston wasn’t able to recover from her addictions, but it’s speculation on what her challenges may have been. Friends who were interviewed at the time of her death said that Houston lived two lives: one, the clean-cut protégé of Arista Records Producer Clive Davis and the other a rebellious Jersey girl who liked partying and bad boys. However, plenty of stars have found and maintained long-term sobriety, which is partly why the demise of Houston is so confusing and upsetting. She was wealthy, talented and beautiful. She was a beloved daughter, mother and icon with so much to live for why couldn’t she get her shit together? Unfortunately, there is only one person who could have truly answered that question.
What We Can Learn
As tragic as it is, there is a lot we can learn from Whitney Houston’s death and the puzzle pieces we have about her life leading up to it. First, no matter how much we love someone and how much money there is to fix the problem, no one can help anyone who isn’t willing to help themselves (though I have no intimate knowledge of Whitney’s efforts to get clean, it’s clear that being loved and being rich were not the problem). Second, addicts who don’t experience consequences aren’t likely to change—so protecting people we love isn’t always helping them. And third, you should never, ever, get high and then take a bath.
Photo courtesy of Asterio Tecson [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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