The greatest love of all is to not let yourself get addicted to crack

Salon.com has a really good piece about the tragic downfall of Whitney Houston. I can't say I'm a Whitney fan, but I'm always sad when really talented people destroy their gifts. There aren't enough talented people as it is. To see the truly special piss it all away is sad, unfortunate and infuriating.

Two weeks ago, a story by Los Angeles celebrity journalist Nick Papps began, "It's hard to believe that the drugged, dazed woman staring out from [an accompanying] picture was once one of the most popular singers in the world ... But today that woman, Whitney Houston, 42, is just another crack head."

The dim assessment came in response to tabloids that on March 29 printed photos of what is supposedly Houston's Atlanta bathroom, littered with crack pipes, cocaine-coated spoons, cigarette butts, Budweiser cans and garbage. The photos were taken, and sold to the magazines, by Houston's sister-in-law, who provided an accompanying tale of the singer's cracked-out habits, from hallucinating violent demons, to biting and hitting herself, putting her hand through walls, and locking herself away to smoke rock cocaine and pleasure herself with an apparently prodigious collection of vibrators. Speaking about the mess on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor," Billboard executive editor Tamara Conniff said, "I think that she was a really well-manicured diva star and she just turned a little ghetto."