Diana (23 page)

At the launch of Help the Aged’s jubilee celebration: “We have a duty to ensure that the elderly are felt to be valued and important members of our society.”

On drug addiction

In 1986, Diana opened the Northeast Council on Addiction in Newcastle. “There are an increasing number of families in this country which have some first-hand knowledge or experience of the despair, misery, and sheer waste of life that the problem of drug addiction causes. We have a battle on our hands. It has to be waged on two major fronts: prevention and cure. As far as prevention is concerned, parents and teachers are in the front line. As a parent myself, I’m only too aware of the responsibility this implies in terms of the kind of upbringing best suited to encourage the child to say no. From the point-of-view of ‘cure,’ it is vitally important to have adequate facilities available, such as those which allow ex-addicts to run homes or treatment centers for people who have made the decision to try and abandon drugs.”

Speaking at the Thirty-sixth International Conference on Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Glasgow, in August 1992: “Addiction removes almost any
semblance of social behavior in people who might previously have seemed pleasant. This is termed untrue by some who say that alcohol and alcoholics have contributed inestimably to mankind. Undoubtedly contributions have been made to the world by people who are alcoholics. But I doubt it was the alcohol. Sadly people still regard this as moral weakness. A number of these self-appointed moralists even chose to make such judgments from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. Presumably they regard cigarette smoking as normal, morally neutral, and nonaddictive. Addiction is a fast-growing malignancy which destroys almost everything in its path. Even those who make money out of it—not just the pushers and dealers—are destroying the society in which they may wish to appear affluent. There is little point in being a gold-plated tin in a dustbin.”

“For decades, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and antidepressants have been given to generations of women—three times as many as to men. These ‘mother’s little helpers’ have left a legacy of millions
of women doomed to a life of dependence from which there is still very little help to escape.”

In a 1993 speech to the Institute for Drug Dependence in New York, Diana said, “Hugging has no harmful side effects. If we all play our part, the result will be tremendous. There are potential huggers in every household.”

On AIDS

In April 1987, Diana took off her gloves and held hands with AIDS patient Shane Snape at Britain’s first AIDS ward at Middlesex Hospital. She said to Shane, “It must be really difficult for you.”

From a speech on AIDS: “HIV does not make people dangerous to know. So you can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows, they need it…. We cannot afford to think of HIV and AIDS as someone else’s problem and put it to the
back of our minds. If we do, we risk turning what is, in the end, just another life-threatening illness into a plague which will create fear and suspicion in place of goodwill and humanity amongst far more people than will ever feel the effects of the disease.”

After holding a dying black baby with AIDS in a Harlem hospital in 1989: “I felt so sad when I think about how I held that little boy in my arms. It was so moving. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman traveling alone. It never feels so bad when my husband is with me.”

At an AIDS conference in 1991: “Don’t be so smug. It could be you next.”

Diana’s friend, art dealer Adrian Ward Jackson, died of AIDS complications in August 1991, just minutes before she arrived at the hospital. She said: “If more people are now aware of what a
dreadful disease AIDS is, then his death will not be in vain. It is an experience I shall never forget.”

In Cape Town, March 1997: “If I can help in any way [with AIDS prevention in South Africa], then I will do it.”

On the homeless

“If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then what happens to that young Englishman when he has no home? And if that Englishman is young—perhaps midteens, early twenties—what greater risks will confront him? Neither are the homeless made up of twenty- and thirty-year-olds who’ve had their chance at life and failed miserably. The age of homeless youngsters is coming down. Children as young as eleven called on Centrepoint [shelter] this year. Some had been running from physical and emotional violence, some from sexual abuse.”

With her children at her side, she said this to a homeless man in a shelter: “Tonight I am not a princess; my sons are not the two princes. I’m Diana, this is William, and this is Harry. You never look up, you never look down, you look straight ahead.”