Pete Doherty needs help. His fans should boycott his records until he gets it

He was also part of a group who allegedly pushed a young man off a balcony to his death a couple of years ago. He’s escaped justice on that one, too. I agree he needs help: but the guy’s an out-and-out criminal.

Pop star, what on earth? You’ve clearly never heard a record of his.

Also, the reason he served six weeks of a six month sentence was actually just standard procedure. If you are sentenced to under a year, you only have to serve half of it in the prison, and halfway through that you are eligible to go out on tag – exactly what happened in Peter’s case. Nothing to really complain about him there, more a problem with the justice system.

I by no means try to justify everything this man does, because quite plainly, he is not a saint (and those that think he is seem to be the only fans anybody notices – WE’RE NOT ALL LIKE THAT). But he is, a very talented and troubled man. He is also extremely unwell. He does need to pull himself together. But this article is ridiculous, and really won’t help anything at all. It’s as bad as all the tabloids that created the ‘pied piper of heroin’ which he has never tried to be. I’ve met the man. He is no ‘evil monster’. There is a good heart there, it just doesn’t always surface because all anybody sees is the addiction.

If you’d ACTUALLY done ANY investigating into his fan base whatsoever, you’d know that we are all constantly wishing for him to get help, for him to get clean, and so on. Any fan board you visit will have numerous threads and comments to this effect. Stopping buying records and going to gigs isn’t going to help. Anybody who knows the first thing about addiction, knows that the person has to really, REALLY want to stop. And it doesn’t matter what the other circumstances are.

The system is broke. But lets be honest. No politician here is ever going to put forward the idea, because we have such an anti-drug culture. ‘Junkies’ are classified amongst the lowest of the low, and it’s awful because these people need help. But until society changes, the law won’t. Remember, ‘politics’ is just to please the people, nobody actually does something because it’s the right thing any more. They do it for votes. Pure and simple.

Peter is one of the most talented people I have ever had the pleasure to come across, and it breaks my heart to see him fighting the addiction. But please don’t make it seem like the fans haven’t noticed he’s unwell, we have, we’ve been on about it for years. What it all comes down to, in the present system and way of dealing with it, is that it has to be him that wants it more than anything. And I don’t think he’s there yet.

But I believe in Peter Doherty. I know he will change. It just might take a long time. And I wish him the best of luck in doing so.

read what happened on Peters website blog thing….he’ll tell you what happened. He never pushed anyone. he wrote on his website about Mark Blancos death….
 ”I have said nothing about any of this up until now. Even the words attributed to me are incorrect. I’ll tell you how I feel:Sick to my heart with sadness for the parents and family of both Mark and Robyn, for different reasons, although in both cases the relatives have suffered due to the unprincipled media’s insistence that foul play and the ‘evil junky Pete Doherty’ are to blamne for two tragic deaths.
Mrs Blanco. Your son was well-liked and well-loved and many respected him, for his wit and his talent and his intelligence. I met him on two occasions. The night that he died he was intensely agitated and extremely hyper-active and intoxicated. He was ejected from Paul’s flat because of his aggressive and loud attempts to belittle me and assert his view that i was a hyped up popstar and he was a talented actor about to star in a play called ‘accidental death of an anarchist’. Paul was dismayed that his friend was showing me this side of his character when in reality we could have been friends and exchanged ideas, combined creative energy and generally used the sometime ‘crackden’ as a thriving studio of literary and artistic output that it occasionally was.
WHEN HE LEFT THE FLAT HE Was alone and when he fell or jumped he was alone. THAT is what happened. he either fell or was making an extreme point about the nature of life imitating art .
I need to think . I need to explain. I need you to know that these families are torturing themselves in the quest for sinister plots and answers that are not there.”

i completely agree.

I am grown up! And if you read Fr Lucie-Smith last week you’d know where the Murdoch / Brooks reference came from. I’ve been listening to and yes, making music for the best part of 35 years. I’ve seen fads come and go. And I’ve been around long enough to know that an endorsement from the NME isn’t necessarily a guarantee of quality music. Pete Doherty is I understand a decent if troubled man. He is not however a musical genius at the cutting edge of the modern counter-culture. I don’t judge the man for taking drugs. .I used to! lots of ‘em! ( not opiates though). .that would be silly. I like how you find age 27 to be the pinnacle of maturity. .thats so sweet.

A really good and understanding piece, most people just seem to think addicts deserve to die.  I would love the government to listen to you but I fear they won’t because it is just not the popular view.

 ”Have you listened to his music? If they’re so rubbish then why has he
been performing since what 2000? And if his music was so rubbish
then obviously The Libertines didn’t win Best New Band at the 2003 NME
awards and Best Band a year later at the NME awards.”

## Popularity is no sign at all of value. The NOTW was popular – because Murdoch had debased it, so that it appealed to people’s basest appetites. As long as a bad book, or worthless poetry, or an “elephant dung Madonna” (not Miss Ciccione, the earlier Madonna), or an exhibition of plastinated corpses, or some junk in formaldehyde, can become popular, it can become even more popular; often because people’s desire to be accepted by others stifles their critical faculties, so that tjhey don’t dare say that what is being praised to the skies by all around them, is talentless, tasteless, debased and debasing rubbish. And the disease, once given its head, spreads. This is not a new problem – it’s at least as old as the 19th century. 

I agree. I’ve got many cds by artists who’s music is best described as challenging ( aphex twin, some psytrance acts etc) It is however interesting and innovative and of worth. . not everyone’s cup of tea but of artistic worth nonetheless. Now, having listened to Pete Doherty and Carl Barat I can honestly say- and without being deliberatly provocative-  it is amateurish drivel which sounds like a bunch of spotty 6th formers messing about in the music class at school. Their celebrity is based on drug/drink ingestion and not much else. This is not to say that Pete doesn’t deserve all the help available to him and the sympathy of everyone also. There but for the grace of God. . A boycott of his work as advocated by Fr Lucie-Smith is punitive posturing by a man who really should know better. . and made all the more worse by his previous obsequiousness to  News International. There are certainly moral grounds in advocating a boycott of the N.I media.

you have missed just one point – he is one of the best songwriters in england today. 

Wow, surprisingly intelligent article. All drugs need to be legalised so they can be controlled properly by the government, rather than the gangsters/criminals. Police need to have their time freed up to deal with better things. 
By making drugs illegal, you glamorise them. And make them very appealing to kids of a young age.

pop star? really?

amame cuando menos lo merezca porque es cuando mas lo necesito”
(love me when i don’t deserve it, because it’s when i need it)