Monday, July 25, 2011 7:17am ET by  
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Russell Brand pens raw and emotional eulogy for Amy Winehouse

Russell Brand, the husband of pop songstress Katy Perry, has written a piece for British newspaper The Guardian on the death of Amy Winehouse and how modern society deals with addiction. 

The actor is no stranger to the struggles that Winehouse faced and wrote extensively about both his own experiences and how he could understand, to an extent, what she was going through:

"Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they're not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil."

Brand also opened up about his friendship with the tragically troubled singer, adding, "I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction."

The 36-year-old star of 'Get Him To The Greek' was able to overcome his own addiction, but ended the piece by stressing that help is there and that all people need to do is "pick up the phone and make that call". He concluded that not everyone is lucky enough to recover and that the 'Back To Black' singer will forever be a shocking reminder of this:

"Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease."

Watch footage from when Winehouse was a guest on Brand's chat show, below: