For my money, CNN’s Dr. Drew Pinsky has delivered the likeliest explanation of why Amy Winehouse is dead. “Opiate addiction takes months to years of treatment,” he explained yesterday. “And one of the most serous risks in my experience of that recovery for celebrities and particularly musicians is that they return to their career, they return to the road far too prematurely, and it’s absolutely predictable what will happen.

“People look at these stories and go, ‘Oh, addiction treatment doesn’t work.’ The crazy thing about addiction is that part of the disease is a disturbance of thinking [in which] addict tell themselves they don’t need to listen to what they’re being told to do.

“But just as with the diabetic, if they don’t take their insulin [and] the addict doesn’t do their recovery program, they inevitably in all cases will relapse, and if it’s opiate addiction, it’s a progrssion to fatality. The prognosis for an opiate addict is worse than the vast majority of cancers.”