[Dutch Boy]

I suspect that he was surrounded by leaches that didn’t want the gravy train to end. They enabled him to spin out of control. Some one early on should have taken him aside and smacked some sense into him. This goes for all the other out of control celebrities and politicians.

[Osnome]

>>Some one early on should have taken him aside and smacked some sense into him. This goes for all the other out of control celebrities and politicians.<<

Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Amy Wino-House.

The Kennedys?

[Osnome]

“FoxNews: Patrick Kennedy Temporarily Leaving Rehab for a G&T .... errrrrr, to Vote on C&T
“

[Richard Kimball]

In the book, Wired, about John Belushi, it talks about the posse that followed him around. He was hooked on drugs and towards the end hired a couple of guys to keep drugs away from him. One was a former FBI agent, and he kept the drugs away from Belushi, but finally gave up and quit. He said it was a 24 hour job; he couldn't even let Belushi go to the bathroom alone, cause one of his buddies would hide dope in there for him. Belushi hired Bill "superfoot" Wallace, the former karate fighter, to keep him away from drugs. Wallace wasn't capable of doing it, as he didn't have the smarts that the FBI agent did. Wallace was the one who found Belushi after the OD.

Jackson's doctor had a brand new BMW parked outside the house where Jackson died. The doctor was making a fortune supplying Jackson with the pills. If he had said no, Jackson would have found another doctor who would have supplied the pills.

The simple fact is that whatever talents Jackson had, he was a complete head case and drug addict. I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did.

[Star Traveler]

You said — Some one early on should have taken him aside and smacked some sense into him.

—

Well, it may sound good when writing that, but it doesn’t work that way in real life, because people around a person like that, don’t have the ability to force the situation. And neither do the courts have the ability to force a situation like that, for a person to “get help” if that person does not want it.

The only time that a court can, is if someone is declared unable to take care of themselves, but that’s not easy to prove (and nor should it be, or else everyone would be doing that to everyone else, just because they didn’t like that person’s choices for living their own life).

A court might also be able to get “involved” if there is a crime that is committed, by that person and then they come under some kind of jurisdictional control of the court. But, that would be rare for all the situations where relatives or friends think that another person (that they know or are related to) is “destroying their life” by bad decisions and their actions.

And with our society respecting the freedom that a person has to choose and determine their own “way” (and I think rightly so, as far as it does go these days), you’re not going to be able to “enforce” your own view of what another person should do in their own life.

Furthermore, this idea of taking one aside and slapping them around, either figuratively or literally — will really only get you “banished” from their lives. You’ll find, if you’ve ever tried to “talk sense” into someone and they keep ignoring you — that you’re really powerless to affect someone else, if you don’t have any “levers” over them. And if you do, and they don’t like you doing that, they’ll simply remove you and those “levers” from their life, in other words, get rid of you, out of their life.

And so, in the end, you’ve got a “balance” with someone whom you think should do something different in what they are doing — in that if you don’t have any leverage and you’re trying to use “moral persuasion” to convince them — you can’t push too hard, or “your outta there”, and thus have no influence any more, in any case. And if you manage to “stay in there” and effect some influence, it’s only because you’re not *alienating them* and making them push you away permanently.

So, what you say, simply *does not work* in real life...