Happy Idiot Poses With Her Ticket To Nose Candy Paradise
Give an idiot a million bucks and you've got a wealthy idiot. From the Daily Mail:
Three months after pledging to turn her life around and get a job, a lottery winner convicted of fraud has died from a suspected overdose.
In June Amanda Clayton pleaded no contest to fraud, having continued to collect state welfare handouts despite pocketing her $1 million prize.
She accepted her punishment and was said by her lawyer to be trying to move on. But on Saturday morning she was found dead at her Michigan home.
H/T iOTW
13 comments:
You don't understand; the world OWED her.
So sad... that her life had gone so downhill that she committed suicide.
It is also sad that our culture today advocates for government dependency.
WoFat - in all fairness she might have done the same thing without the Lottery winnings. It's just the irony of it all that speaks to us.
Teresa - I could be wrong, but from the story it appears that this was apparently an accidental death. That the government needs to further enslave addictive personalities by offering opportunities to gamble is despicable.
I understand how she bought into the risks inherent to this "lifestyle" and as an adult is responsible for her own actions.
But as a recovering alcoholic myself, I wonder what demons might have been chasing her? The truth is that nobody goes into their high school "career day" presentations and comes out thinking, "Cool, I'll be a frigging pathetic junkie!".
Subvet - part of the problem is that users may be getting a purer, more potent dosage than they are expecting. Heroin quality is particularly high and kids are now able to smoke it. Plus, they are more prone to experiment with unfamiliar drugs when they are intoxicated by another.
About 1400 kids drink themselves to death every year. That age group is just prone to risks - couple it with poor judgement and you have a deadly cocktail. I forget how many bodies I had to photograph in various stages of decomposition because of OD's.
1400 kids? And they are pushing for gun control and the legalization of drugs... for the kids?
But as for fixing stupid, I think she most certainly did, tragically. I'm sort of with Subvet though. While I never did become an alcoholic, it wasn't from lack of effort. A case, a fifth of vodka, and a fifth of Yukon, in 8 hours several times a month/week. Yeah, going to engineering school ended that quickly. I had a simple choice and I chose, and was able to choose school. I never got back into drinking heavily afterward.
There are some ways to fix stupid, but youthful stupid? I think we are all just lucky to have survived it, whether we know it or not.
Maybe if drugs were legal she wouldn't have gotten drugs that would allow her to take a lethal dose. ie. they could be designed to have less effect the more you take.
Let's make drugs legal like Portugal did in 1990-something and now have far fewer people doing drugs. But Nooooooo, we must save everyone.
One of the worst situations to be in is to be an addict with lots of free money.
Doom - Another chapter in this ongoing drama is the cultural content. The popular youth cultures glorify drugs/sex/violence - those who knew her best may not have been surprised by news of her demise.
Again, it may be a DNA thing; Subvet struggled with his addiction and you (like I) shrugged off the siren call. I stopped drinking over 30 years ago but was not a alcoholic - God lead me to decide that my second marriage stood a far better chance of succeeding if alcohol was not in the picture. Thirty years later I can't argue with the results.
And Subvet - I congratulate you on your sobriety. It is a difficult thing to maintain for a recovering addict. My addiction was cigarettes and it took a heart attack to get me to drop it.
I thought this story might end like this. What a waste.
Odie - unfortunately the success stories don't get much print. If it bleeds it ledes so to speak. From what little we hear of it, many lottery winners end up in bankruptcy.
I think I may look into that a bit.
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