Amy Winehouse’s dad is worried about his famous daughter’s self-harming. Mitch Winehouse had discovered the numerous cuts on the “Rehab” singer’s arms earlier this week when her pictures surfaced on the Internet, and he wasn’t too happy when he asked Amy about the cuts.

Mitch confronted the 24-year-old Grammy Award-winning artist but she was evasive about the cuts and refused to discuss it.

The dad says, “I saw the cuts and told Amy that her arm didn’t look good. But she just said, ‘It’s nothing.’ Amy is not as responsive as we would like. It is worrying. It’s a very painful situation.”

Meanwhile, Amy is said to be suffering from “black moods” while her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, is still incarcerated in London’s Pentonville Prison awaiting his trial on perverting the course of justice and assault.

She reportedly went to visit Blake but she was refused entry.

A source says, “Amy has been getting in black moods over Blake. Blake was really annoyed she couldn’t visit him and is getting increasingly paranoid about her.”

The Rolling Stones‘ Keith Richards has warned Amy Winehouse off drugs, stating that she “isn’t going to be around long” if she doesn’t stop.

The guitarist also said that the singer is his favourite modern artist.

Richards explained: “There’s only one [singer I like], that girl Amy. Mind you, that girl isn’t going to be around long unless she sorts herself out pretty quick. Amy’s got to get smart.

“I’m not a preacher. But I’ve been there and you have to pass it on.”

Speaking to the Mail On Sunday, Richards also compared her legal problems with those of The Rolling Stones in the 1970s, saying: “It completely took over our lives creatively and we couldn’t do this and couldn’t do that.

“You had to spend all your time trying to deal with the police. The same thing has happened to Amy Winehouse.”

As if Amy Winehouse didn’t have enough problems, she has now been condemned by the United Nations.

Speaking out against “coke-snorting fashionistas”, UN drug tsar Antonio Maria Costa described Winehouse as “the poster girl for drug abuse”.

It is all to do with a controversial report by the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board, which attempts to link “celebrity endorsement of drug related lifestyles” to the boom in European cocaine consumption and devastation being wrought in Africa as new drug-smuggling routes open up. Costa claimed “one song, one picture, one quote that makes cocaine look cool can undo millions of pounds worth of anti-drug education and prevention”.

Costa’s accusations are not based on statistical research. Rather it is an intuitive notion that celebrities are role models who influence social behaviour. And, by singling out Winehouse, Costa focuses his ire on the strand of celebrity culture most frequently accused of corrupting the young and impressionable.

Popular music and drugs have been linked by a century of rebellious counter-cultural attitudes and a predilection to hedonism (probably endemic in any medium whose roots are in social dancing).

There is an undeniable link between alcohol and the blues, marijuana and jazz, LSD and psychedelic rock, cocaine and disco, speed and punk, weed and reggae, crack and rap, ecstasy and house music, with the disturbing spectre of heroin lurking behind many of pop culture’s edgiest and often most tragic figures.

A study published last month by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine claimed that one third of the most popular songs in America (based on analysis of the 2005 Billboard charts) mentioned substance abuse of some kind. The worst-offending genre, predictably, was hip hop. Mind you, those who would censure music might be surprised to learn that it was closely followed by country and western. Only four songs (all in the rock genre) contained specific messages against substance abuse.

Although the study was careful not to draw conclusions regarding exposure to lyrics and social behaviour, Costa (executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime) has been more forthright. “Amy Winehouse might adopt a defiant pose and slur her way through Rehab, but does she realise the message she sends to others who are vulnerable to addiction?”

Personally, I am not sure if Winehouse makes a very good poster girl for drug abuse. Photographed emaciated, bruised and bleeding, weeping over her jailed husband, slurring onstage, cancelling shows, her closely (and somewhat salaciously) documented journey from pop princess to barely functioning addict seems more like a cautionary tale.

Girls, do you want to wind up scruffy, scrawny and toothless? Just say yes. Certainly, she has fame, which seems the primary aspiration of a huge section of the young population, but few would deny that it was based on her exceptional talent.

Back to Black was a hit before anyone knew the extent of Winehouse’s problems. She may have sung “No, no, no” to rehab, but the celebratory defiance of that line was surely tempered by news that she has been in and out of rehab ever since.

Winehouse’s story is a tragedy unfolding and has largely been reported as such. Like Billie Holiday or Janis Joplin, exceptional singers who struggled with addiction in less media-saturated times, Winehouse is a poignant figure, whose intensity of expression and tendency towards self-destruction seem psychologically linked. I suspect you would have to be particularly ill-tuned to popular culture to think she is an aspirational figure.

There is nothing new in any of this, which makes it all the more curious that the UN has finally decided to weigh in. When it comes to poster stars for drug abuse, Keith Richards (at 63, a contemporary of Costa’s) is surely the daddy of them all.

Unlike Winehouse, Richards is widely viewed as a kind of heroic figure, as much for surviving decades of being utterly stoned as anything else. Such is his iconic status, old leather-face is currently appearing in a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign, seated next to a piece of designer luggage. Frankly, it is hard to tell which one is supposed to be the suitcase.

They should circulate that picture around schools — kids, this is what a lifetime of drugs will do to you. Even Keith says no these days. Indeed, he was recently heard suggesting that Winehouse “should get her act together”, perhaps overlooking the fact that it took him nearly two decades to kick heroin, and (I can testify from having spent some very enjoyable time in his company) he remains a heavy drinker.

But there are serious issues here. Pop culture has a strong relationship with drugs, so should its participants bear moral responsibility for the behaviour of their mass audience? With the stiff discomfort of a patrician trying to get down with the kids, Costa quoted lyrics from the JJ Cale/Eric Clapton blues classic Cocaine, before concluding: “If you don’t care what cocaine can do to you, at least take responsibility for how it can damage the lives of others.”

Yet his example demonstrates the over-simplification of the whole argument. Cocaine is not a straightforward anti-drugs anthem but a song of great ambivalence, at once enamored and fearful of the narcotic high.

And Clapton rose up through the acid-fuelled psychedelic rock boom, becoming a full-blown alcoholic and heroin addict, before getting sober at the age of 46 (Winehouse is still only 24).

Now Clapton owns a rehab clinic and counsels fellow addicts. He is full of regret for his past, yet there are those who would suggest his latterday music has never touched the heights of his early, narcoticised offerings.

In pop culture in particular there has been, perhaps, a dangerous notion that drugs fuel creativity. Yet it is impossible to deny that some of the greatest music ever made was, at the very least, influenced by drug culture.

The Beatles are still venerated as the greatest band ever (and are often held up as role models for their peace politics), yet they are also one of the most drug-saturated bands in pop history, from the psychedelic highs of Sgt Pepper to the brutal lows of John Lennon’s Cold Turkey.

Hank Williams, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson, Pete Townshend, Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Elton John, Bob Marley, George Michael, Kurt Cobain, Nick Cave, Noel Gallagher — some of the most legendary figures of popular music have had acknowledged drug habits. Some were destroyed by it, some survived it and some remain unrepentant.

Many others, of course, never took drugs in their lives (or certainly never openly embraced them). Rock heroes such as Frank Zappa and Bruce Springsteen have been outspoken against drugs. For every defiant anthem of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll (”is all my brain and body needs” to quote Ian Dury’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek contribution to the debate) there is a comedown song such as Neil Young’s quietly moving Needle and the Damage Done. And, for every iconic drug survivor such as Keith Richards, there is a Jimi Hendrix extinguished in their youth in the most pathetic circumstances imaginable.

Pop culture doesn’t tell one story about drugs, it tells all kinds of stories, reflecting society as much as shaping it. We don’t know the end of Amy Winehouse’s story yet, but it would be simplistic to suggest that there is only one possible moral conclusion to be drawn.

The UN drug tsar insisted: “If Miss Winehouse advertised fur coats or blood diamonds, there would be a backlash. Yet when she is the poster girl for drug abuse, nobody seems to care.”

But actually, a lot of people care. They care about her music. They care about her well-being. They just don’t see the fate of nations hanging on whether she makes it through rehab or not.

The Beatles legend - who sang the title track for hit 1973 Bond film Live and Let Die - thinks troubled singer Amy has the perfect voice for a theme
song, and offered some advice to her.

He said: “I think Amy Winehouse would be really good, and I think she would do a really good job. My advice to her would be not to try and rhyme Solace with anything - that’s too hard.”

Paul also said despite being responsible for one of the most popular Bond tunes of all time, he wouldn’t want to have the responsibility again.

He added: “I definitely wouldn’t do it again. I have been trying to think of something to rhyme with Solace and all I can come up with is Wallace! I don’t envy whoever is going to do the song!”

Other singers who have recorded a 007 theme tune include, Dame Shirley Bassey, Tina Turner, Sir Tom Jones, Carly Simon and Lulu.

When a United Nation’s panel released a report criticizing “celebrity ‘endorsement’ of drug-related lifestyles,” they seemed to be talking about Amy Winehouse, a singer in the British tabloids more for her partying than for her songs, although one of them was a screed against rehab.

Over the weekend, another U.N. official stepped up to the plate for a more specific whacking. From an Op-Ed by Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in The Observer:

Amy Winehouse might adopt a defiant pose and slur her way through ‘Rehab’, but does she realise the message she sends to others who are vulnerable to addiction and who cannot afford expensive treatment? Are such stars who flaunt their drug use aware of the damage caused by the trafficking of cocaine from South America via Africa to Europe? One song, one picture, one quote that makes cocaine look cool can undo millions of pounds’ worth of anti-drug education and prevention.

Why is this behaviour socially acceptable? If Ms Winehouse advertised fur coats or blood diamonds, there would be a backlash, yet when she is the poster girl for drug abuse, nobody seems to care.

But the Winehouse camp was not taking this laying down, as these remarks via CNN showed:

Winehouse’s spokesman, Chris Goodman, called Costa a “ludicrous man.”

“Amy has never given a quote about drugs or flaunted it in any way,” Goodman told the newspaper. “She’s had some problems and is trying to get better. The U.N. should get its own house in order.”

The U.N. might argue that its recent push against celebrities was part of getting its house in order on drug control. Was it a wise move?