Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography Read Online Free PDF

make something of herself. Cheryl knew that she had something special and that she had a future in showbiz, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to waste what talent she had, or any opportunities that came her way, by getting caught up in the world of drugs.
    ‘Heroin was there for the taking,’ she told The Times in 2007. ‘I could easily have taken that route if I’d wanted to. But I always maintained my ambition and I’m proud of myself. That nightmare devastated family and friends, but I’m grateful. If I hadn’t been exposed to that at such a young age, who knows what might have happened?’
    But in 2005, Cheryl did experience what could have happened if she’d made the wrong decisions, when a school friend called John Courtney was found dead from a heroin overdose. The twenty-one-year-old had become friends with Cheryl during their time at Walker’s School, and they had grown very close. Like Cheryl, John had dreams and potential. A gifted footballer, his sports teachers and the local football manager reckoned he had a bright future in the sport and dubbed him ‘another Shearer’.
    After leaving school, however, the good-natured boy’s life was turned on its head when he became hooked on heroin and fell into a life of crime, which resulted in a jail spell. According to John’s mum, Angie Courtney, Cheryl was a light in her son’s life.
    ‘She was always a lovely girl and a good friend of John’s while they were teenagers,’ she told local newspaper the Evening Chronicle. ‘When John died, we got hundreds of flowers and more than three hundred cards, but hers were among the first to arrive. She sent them as soon as she heard. While John was alive, she came to our house and wrote him a note, telling him to get off the drugs and he kept it on his wall to remind him that he had to keep battling it.’
    Sadly, Cheryl’s attempts to help John shake off his habit failed, and on 2 April 2005, just three weeks after being released from prison, John’s body was found curled up on a carpet in his uncle’s house, a needle lying next to him. In order to raise awareness of the growing drug epidemic in Newcastle, his parents gave the Evening Chronicle permission to print a picture of his corpse. The paper launched its ‘War On Drugs’ campaign, which Cheryl backed wholeheartedly, pledging, ‘I’m in total support of John Courtney’s family in raising awareness about the devastating effects of heroin addiction.’
    In 2007, Cheryl, sickened by the media’s positive portrayal of notorious rock junkie Pete Doherty, would use her friend’s untimely death as a warning to her fans in an interview with Piers Morgan in GQ. ‘His mother crumbled to a five-and-a-half stone wreck by the end, because he’d even steal Christmas presents from his family to feed his habit. And then to see pictures of Doherty glamorizing it, and with Kate Moss on his arm, too. It makes me sick. Heroin is devil’s dust, it ruins lives and families, and everything it touches. I’ve seen what drugs do to people.’
    She went on to tell Piers that it broke her heart to see her friends and family go through the horror of drugs andadmitted, ‘It put me off for life … Smackheads tell so many lies. You convince yourself they’re going to change, you’re blinded by love. Yet the man you love is spaced out in bed all day. It’s so destructive for everyone around them. I don’t feel sorry for addicts, they know what they’re doing. Kids may have been offered a spliff twenty years ago, now it’s smack that can kill them. Leopards don’t change their spots.’
    Speaking to OK! magazine, tough-talking Cheryl offered no sympathy to Pete Doherty. ‘I couldn’t give a shit about him and I don’t care if I never see a picture of him again … He’s had umpteen chances to get off it in rehab but it’s clear that he doesn’t want to … It’s not living, it’s existing … It’s devastating and I hope kids realize that it’s not the