Russell Brand might be a huge star, but he mixed himself into a posh environment in the UK yesterday as he appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee to talk about his experiences with drug addiction and also give some suggestions on UK drug policy. Whilst everyone else in the room were dressed in posh suits and spoke with a posh truly British voice, Russell wore a vest top and chains around his neck, exposing his tattoos and spoke in his true typical Mary Poppins London accent. He poked fun at members of parliament at one point and even quoted the rapper Tupac Shakur like he was some kind of famous poet. Russell claimed there needs to be more "love and compassion" for addicts and he also tried to claim that celebrities play a big role in what people do with their lives. On if celebrities are role models, he said: "As the great Tupac Shakur said, role is something people play, model is something that people make. Both of them things are fake. What I want to offer people is truth and authenticity. I can't be held responsible for what the cipher of my image is used to represent... Celebrity is a vapid, vacuous and toxic concept used to distract people from what's actually important, which in this case is treatment of disease of addiction." Russell is no stranger to having his voice heard about drug addiction. After the death of Amy Winehouse last year, he wrote an open letter. It said: "Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. Now my Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today.”
