Shock horror news: Amy Winehouse does drugs. And there we were thinking she was just out for a jog when snapped running through freezing streets in her bra and bare feet the other week.

The singer's new “bootleg” video, published by The Sun, which shows her apparently smoking crack has now been “seized” by the Metropolitan Police. No doubt they are following the legal precedent set in the Kate Moss case: that while it is no longer deemed a crime to take drugs at a party, it is a serious offence to do so on the front page of a newspaper. Even if charges prove impossible, the Met gets its shot of celebrity PR.

Some claim that this storm in a crack pipe is important because Winehouse is a “role model”. Lord knows what they are on if they want pop stars to give our children moral guidance. Anyway, the fashion now is to hold up bad 'uns such as Amy as “reverse role models” to frighten da kids away. She can certainly look scary, but teenagers are a bit old for bogeywoman stories.

More understandably the cry went up to save the talented songstress by getting her into rehabilitation, even if it were against her will. Yet in one sense the “No, no, no” message of Rehab, her most famous song, is perfectly sensible: if people don't want to go, rehab is a pointlessly punitive exercise. Addicts give up when they are ready to, often prompted by a lifestyle change. But public pressure had only seemed to drive Winehouse closer to her druggie husband, now on remand charged with assault and perverting the course of justice (a case she too has been quizzed about: potentially far more serious than what she gets up to in her flat).

This week Winehouse's father reported that “she says she is OK, so no problems” since “all that picture shows is what everybody knew anyway”. Childish or not, she is 24 and old enough to make her own choices. She is also young enough to wake up and quit if she chooses, with the support of her family and close friends (though probably not those who sell videos to the papers). If not, there is little they can do.

The demand that wayward celebrities must be marched off to rehab is as authoritarian as it is often useless. For many sad cases hooked on publicity a well-advertised spell in a high-profile clinic has become an empty ritual, a way of showing public repentance through the modern confessional of the mass media.

That is why part of me always liked Winehouse, not for her sordid lifestyle but for her refusal to toe the line. Even faced with the storm that followed those pictures, she still said no, no, no, and denied reports that she had finally gone into rehab. Then yesterday her record company suddenly announced that she had indeed entered a rehab clinic “after talks with her record label, management, family and doctors” - presumably in that order.

The outcome remains to be seen. But nobody ever succeeded in kicking an addiction as a PR stunt.

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