Thank you for helping put a face to this problem. Your memorial to Kim is beautiful and you write eloquently about her. I have to confess that when I read your words, "I had used up all my best arguments," I teared up. Who amongst us has not tried to persuade someone we love who is making serious mistakes to help herself or save himself.

Sometimes at Broadsheet we get a little cavalier about the problems of others and we need real life reminders not to do that.

In my letter above, for "you people" read "young people."

Your Web site is a beautiful memorial to Kimmy.

One hopes that educating you people about the dangers of excessive alcohol will discourage others from going the same route, but it is an uphill battle especially when drunkenness, as you say, is upgraded to partying in the popular lingo. Better to call it what it is.

Drunkbesity is also a disease, though probably more prevalent among men.

Clicking on my sig will take you to the Web site I built on the first anniversary after Kimmy died from a toxic combination of alcoholism and bulimia. The issue is not what the condition is called, but how dangerous it is. What young people need to know is that these two diseases in tandem are far more quickly lethal than either is by itself.

Kim has now been dead for 13 years, and I think of how much life she missed. Yet, as her story tells us, she was losing large chunks of her life for years -- the evenings she couldn't remember the next day, the times she passed out drunk and never made it to celebrations.

I just wish we had known as much back then as people do now. These are terrible diseases that collude in ruining people's lives. I just hope that we keep finding better answers.

I have never known a single one that did not have some other sort of diagnosis: panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, BPD, schizoaffective disorder ... and others. My personal opinion is that some women with eating disorders may drink to dull emotional pain.

You might be on to something there. Of course the most common eating disorder by a mile is the disorder of eating too much.

But I think that everything, human beings do is to dull emotional pain, whether it be religion, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, music, exercise, eating, or surfing the Internet.

If you spend your time meditating on the basic facts of life, that each day that passes puts you one day closer to the grave, and that while your memory may survive for a few decades, eventually you will be totally forgotten (I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents) you will probably become distracted and miserable.

Happiness, on the other hand, can practically be defined by the co-phenomenon of loss of the sense of time. How often we hear people saying: "I had no idea it was so late because I was immersed in doing x or y."

Some drug use, like cannabis, is notorious for distorting the perception of time, and this is no coincidence.

However, any study of social phenomena will show us that the pursuit of happiness through drugs and alcohol is fool's gold and that if you are in the business of dulling your emotional pain, there are some ways of doing that that are good for you and for society, and some ways that will just serve to kill you sooner rather than later.

Much better to devote at least a portion of one's time to doing something socially useful and to serving others--which is what you seem to do.

Although we will all be forgotten soon enough, those who spend their lives consoling themselves with drugs and alcohol will be forgotten even more quickly than most. It is their funeral, and at least while they live they provide plenty of employment opportunities for those of us who prop them up while they are still here.

But, if I seem strident, it is only because I would prefer to recruit people who still have the opportunity to live, rather than prop up the living dead.

Obviously when you are working with people who have problems like bulimia and alcoholism you try to understand what they are experiencing from their point of view and form a rapport with them and try to use that rapport to lead them in a different direction from the one that they have been led by other influences. Most people live on a very day-to-day basis and are not interested or capable of thinking about the bigger picture and their own role in the structure of society.

On the matter of treatment of schizophrenics, my point of view is that heavy smoking is more likely to put people in an early grave than to improve their symptoms of schizophrenia, and that while the drugs available for treatment of schizophrenia at the present time are less than perfect and/or dangerous or have serious side effects, one's best chance of making a fuller recovery is to stay alive long enough to be around when a better treatment comes along. I don't think you will find anyone in the psychiatric professions who will seriously argue otherwise.

This idea that is "out there" that people with schizophrenia smoke to 'self medicate' is for the birds--and even if that is not directly what you said when you introduced the term "self medicating", there are many people who believe that.

Look at the threads on rape. Many people believe that there is no "gray" area and that if a woman says no and the man continues, then he is a criminal.

Now look at the situation with cocaine. There is no gray area either. Try going into court and pleading that you are bipolar and that you only sell cocaine to other bipolars so that you can get enough to self medicate your own condition. See where that lands you.

It is like I have said to some Rastafarians who have got into trouble with the law for cannabis. They say "It's OK to smoke herb 'cos Jah say it." And I say to them, yes, but if you believe you have a right to smoke cannabis because of your religion, you cannot be going to backstreet drug dealers and buying your sacrament and then smoking it in secret. You must go and smoke it on the steps of the police station and be prepared to go to jail for your beliefs as a protest. Alternatively, you should abstain from the sacrament but lobby politically for an exception clause (and good luck to you). But you cannot be ethical and deliberately break the law because you believe the law is wrong unless you are prepared to pay the penalty.