For most people, the death this week of Count Gottfried Von Bismarck, direct descendant of Germany's 'iron chancellor', must have been deeply perplexing.
Here was a flamboyant, smart, clever, Oxford-educated aristocrat, living in a £5m Chelsea flat. Yet with all this potential and opportunity, he died at the age of 44, with 'traces of heroin in his body' after a life blighted by addiction, despair and the deaths of his drug-dependent friends.
Count Gottfried Von Bismarck was, in short, a classic example of that curious phenomenon: the upper-crust junkie.
I am acquainted with the type because for several years I was also a heroin addict in London - and I ran into many of them. It's impossible not to. The hard drugs scene in London is like a small town within a town, a tightly-knit network of
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Why do the rich and privileged throw it all away on heroin?
sean thomas thinks he has the answer |
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dealers, contacts, rehab clinics and 'well-known addresses'. Everyone knows everyone. This twilight underworld is also an egalitarian place: the need for drugs is a fierce social equaliser.
So I know well that the most prosperous and bohemian purlieus of London, and sometimes the seedier backstreets, are full of tragic cases like Bismarck. Walk down the King's Road and you'll see them: monied junkies, wasting trust funds and legacies on class A drugs. Some of them are genuinely aristocratic, some just rich; some are famous themselves, and some have famous parents - like Olivia Channon, daughter of a Tory Cabinet minister, who died of an overdose at Oxford in 1986. She was a close friend of Bismarck's.
Why, then, with all their chances and opportunities, with the finest circumstances that money can buy,  |
