Hans Rausing lived with his dead wife for two months

Life's a bitch when you're a billionaire. Good job there aren't, relatively speaking, too many of them around!:)'

I feel really sorry for Rausing for having screwed up his life so thoroughly and for the loss of his wife and the undignified way in which her body was left for months.

However, both of them are victims of their own self-indulgence. Both came from wealthy backgrounds and met in a drug rehabilitation clinic. Thus neither can be blamed for introducing the other to drugs. And it certainly wasn't social deprivation that drove them to addiction.:cool:

As Shakespeare pointed out. "He is as sick who surfeits with too much as he who starves with nothing."

They just wanted to overdo everything, and their wealth and power meant that few were prepared to tell them to slow down a bit. They could easily get hold of and afford the drugs that so many in sink housing estates have to struggle to get hold of every day.

There was also an element of greed involved. A point made only peripherally in media reports was that Rausing is a tax exile from Sweden. Sweden has a high rate of tax to help support its excellent welfare state, but even after paying the full rate of tax on his vast income from the Tetra-Pak industrial empire, he would still have been a fabuoiusly rich man.

In Sweden, too, his open use of drugs would never have been tolerated in the wealthy circles in which he would have moved there, unlike the UK, where it seems the super-rich can get away with anything.

But greed took over and the new Thatcherite society in the UK beckoned.:(

It's such a sad story. But the ones I really feel sorry for are those who get hooked on drugs and may have to wait months to get into a programme to try and klick the habit. Rausing and his kind can book into any fancy five-star clinic any time. If they can't get their lives back on track with all that support, what chance has Decko the smack addict?

Bad Panda wrote: »

Yes.

I don't.

up for anything wrote: »

One law for the rich and one for the poor - a two month suspended sentence for driving under the influence of drugs! Is there not a law yet where it's a mandatory two year off the road sentence for drugs as well as alcohol?

There are penniless heroin addicts who rob people every second week and only get a few nights in a police cell before the courts set them free. Don't start on this absolute ****ing horse**** about how people are different and treated differently. This is the utmost case of some man in the ultimate of desparity who has been treated with humanity by the courts. He lost the one true love in his life. Who gives a flying **** if he was a billionaire, pauper or someone meeting his mortgage every month. This is a story of a drug addict, someone who was lost to something as amazing and evil as narcotics and who had the privilege afforded to them of a mansion to hide his dead wife's body in. Can you imagine if a heroin addict was traumatised by his heroin addict wife dying with him? Every support group in the country would be out in the papers and tv stations demanding that something more be done for the hugely unfortunate drug addicts in the country. In any ****ing country?

The problem is the state. Let's help these people. If someone robs someone for drug money, then that's an awful thing. But some people just want revenge in that scenario. Do you really think life living in scummy flats, with needles broken across the floor, with rats and strung out people moaning is a life anyone deserves to live? Think about this... That's the life some people choose to live because they see no better for themselves. They have no hope beyond that. This is a guy who lived with his decomposing wife's body for two months because he couldn't face losing her. That's sad. That's more that sad that's awful and horrific. This isn't law for them and us. This is law for the poor people who with or without huge sums of money have to face an horrendous life. They are living a horrific life. There are so many people in Ireland these days living an horrendous life whether they be drug addicts, or simply surviving on the dole, or facing mortgage payments, or working 18 hours a day to give their children what their children deserve. No-one should have to put up with this. No-one should have to face a life where they're not afforded every opportunity that is possible. That means sentencing a drug addled billionaire to rehab just as much as it means doing the same for a drug addled inner city addict. But most of all it means you and I should be demanding that people are treated like ****ing people, with honesty, decency and humanity.