By JJT (written for ThinkChristian.net)

A letter from Scott Weiland’s ex-wife challenges us to take the physical and spiritual costs of addiction more seriously.

We lost another rock star last week when Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver fame finally succumbed to the repercussions of decades of substance abuse and addiction. It’s a song we’ve heard too often. This time, however, even as the tributes and platitudes piled up, Mary Forsberg Weiland, the singer’s ex-wife and the mother of his two children, offered some brutal and painful truth. “December 3rd, 2015 is not the day Scott Weiland died,” she wrote in a letter to Rolling Stone. “It is the official day the public will use to mourn him, and it was the last day he could be propped up in front of a microphone for the financial benefit or enjoyment of others.”

Forsberg Weiland briefly chronicles the painful experience of loving an addict. She also rebukes a culture that not only tolerates but enables and commodifies such self-destruction. Instead of using these tragedies to develop a more sophisticated and effective understanding of mental health, the disease of addiction and the potential for true and lasting recovery, they are wasted. Weiland will be either deified or demonized and nothing worthwhile will come of it.

While there’s certainly no evidence that rock stars experience addiction any more intensely than plumbers, lawyers or stay-at-home mothers, our culture is certainly more accepting of it when it comes to our creative cash cows. They become vicarious fallen heroes, sacrificed on the altar of cool. Some canonize them for living fast, dying young and leaving a pretty corpse, while others dismiss them as victims of their own mistakes who are bound to reap what they sow. The truth, of course, is much more complicated than these simplistic extremes allow.

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