The question always arises after any drug-related celebrity death about whether the star was surrounded by enablers who ignored health risks to keep their meal ticket in motion.   Ahem, Howard K. Stern.  But we may never have seen a celebrity case as extreme as Winehouse’s: The last four to five years of her life represented as extended and public a trainwreck as pop culture has ever witnessed. This was not a Heath Ledger, whose problems were kept largely under wraps, tipped only by suspiciously heavy-lidded interviews, but a superstar who seemed to openly flaunt her drug use, regardless of people shaming her.

“I realize my daughter could be dead within the year,” said her mother, Janis.  “We’re watching her kill herself, slowly. I’ve already come to terms with her dead.  I’ve steeled myself to ask her what ground she wants to be buried in, which cemetery.  Because the drugs will get her if she stays on this road.  I look at Heath Ledger… She’s on (his) path.  It’s like watching a car crash — this person throwing all these gifts away.”  The year of this interview?  2008.

“Perhaps it is time to stop buying records,” said her former father-in-law, Giles Fielder-Civil, suggesting a boycott as a last resort.  “It’s a possibility, to send that message… It’s about time that their friends and their professional colleagues say to them ‘enough is enough’.”  This was all the way back in the summer of 2007.  All the writing was on the wall before she became popular in the states.

Her father-in-law thought a boycott could force Winehouse’s label to reign her in.  But Winehouse’s equally concerned father, Mitch, called in to the same program to say the record company was doing everything it could.  “There’s only one person to blame and that’s Amy,” her father declared four years ago.  “That’s what Blake’s parents have got to understand… There’s no question of the record company or her family trying to work her to the bone.  These are some of the accusations that have been levelled at us.”  In contrast to the popular conception of corporate enablers, Mitch Winehouse described “caring, loving people from the record company, people who have been in the business for 20 or 30 years who are used to seeing matters like this, crying their eyes out because of their genuine love and affection for Amy.  The record company isn’t as callous as some people think it is.”

Given the widespread awareness and acceptance of her problems, surely she could have been saved if she entered rehab, right?  Except that this was the woman who famously said “no, no, no” to rehab.

The first time she went into rehab, by her own ridiculous account, was before she recorded the 2007 hit “Rehab” and helped inspire the nay-saying song.  “I did [go to rehab], for just 15 minutes,’” she told the Sun.  “I went in and said ‘Hello’ and explained that I drink because I’m in love and have [messed] up the relationship.  Then I walked out.”

Winehouse’s parents and representatives of her management set up an intervention meeting after things started deteriorating so publicly in 2007, but Winehouse and her husband skipped it to meet his in-laws at the pub.  But her troubles soon caught the attention of the law.  In Norway, the couple was arrested for drug possession and let off with a fine.  In December, she was busted in London for interfering with a case against Blake, who was soon to spend two years in jail on an assault charge.  In January 2008, Scotland Yard looked into, but ultimately didn’t act on, a world viewed video that showed Winehouse appearing to smoke crack.

When the infamous crack video emerged, Mitch Winehouse said he wanted to get her sectioned under England’s Mental Health Act to force her to clean up, but couldn’t.  “You might consider taking drugs is a danger to herself, but unfortunately the authorities don’t,” he said.  As for her attitude, “Part of the problem is she doesn’t think she’s got a problem.  She thinks she can do what she does recreationally and get on with the rest of her life.”

But, following the bad PR, she did check herself into rehab on January 24, 2008.  Again, she didn’t stay long, and emerged in time to perform via satellite on the Grammy Awards, where she swept the top prizes.  It was the kind of massive validation that some observers thought might shore up her ego and render intoxication unnecessary.  But that assumption hardly took into account the scope of her addiction.

The years 2009-10 brought a bevy of further incidents: an alleged assault against a theater manager who’d asked her to change seats at a performance of “Cinderella”; punching out an innocent fan at a gig, whom she mistook for someone who’d thrown an object at her; messing up the lyrics to “Valerie” at a rare, brief public performance with producer Mark Ronson; and an official end to her literally combative relationship with her husband, though, not surprisingly, she got back together with him for a time after the divorce.

In early 2011, Mitch Winehouse said that his daughter had been clean for about “two and a half years,” while cautioning that “I’m not saying her problems have gone away.”  This provided great reason for optimism, as the father had not been one to sugar-coat her problems in the past.  A European tour was booked during this supposedly healthy time.

But things took another turn for the worse, leading her to make her final entry into rehab on May 27.  As she checked into the Priory Clinic again, an official statement cited her desire to “seek an assessment” and “be ready for performances in Europe this summer.”   We all saw the youtube video in Belgrade though.  The Daily Mail reported the claim that shortly before her death Winehouse purchased “a cocktail of narcotics” that included cocaine and ecstasy, though the authorities in London have cautioned against a leap to judgment about any overdose before autopsy reports come in.

Surely there were enablers on the lower, non-public rungs of Winehouse’s entourage: the dealers and ever-present hangers-on in and around her North London flat.  But when it comes to her family and professional reps, there’s little reason to imagine there was anything in Winehouse’s five-year-long incapacitation for them.  Her father likely had it right in 2007 when he said there was one person to blame: Amy.