I read entertainment news fairly compulsively, even reading about television shows I will never watch and movie stars I know I detest. In this case, I was reading a recent news report about a musician I never deliberately listened to in my life \u2013 Rick James, whose recent death is old news by now. When James first died, drugs were implicated in his death, due to his history as a crack cocaine addict. But the official autopsy results were delayed while a coroner\u2019s pathologist did toxicology and other tests. These results were made public on September 16th. The official cause of death was determined to be heart failure due to an enlarged heart, with numerous drugs listed as contributing factors.<\/p>\n
Numerous, in this case, being nine<\/em> drugs. Here\u2019s the laundry list from the coroner\u2019s statement:<\/p>\n “Toxicology revealed the presence of the following drugs: Alprazolam (Xanax), Diazepam (Valium), Bupropion (Wellbutrin), Citalopram (Celexa), Hydrocodone (Vicodin), Digoxin, Chlorpheniramine, methamphetamine, and cocaine. None of the drugs or drug combinations were found to be at levels that were life threatening in and of themselves.” (Digoxin is a heart medication; Chlorpheniramine is an antihistamine, used to treat allergy and cold symptoms.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What cracks me up about this (aside from the \u201cmeta\u201d crack up of being cracked up about anyone\u2019s death in the first place) is the way that David Campbell, the coroner\u2019s spokesman, made it clear that, because none of the drugs or drug combinations were life threatening in and of themselves, \u201cHe didn’t die of a drug overdose.\u201d<\/p>\n I guess I must have missed the clinical study where they gave rats all nine of these drugs and then carefully observed their hearts as they did not explode, thus proving that James could not have overdosed on the nine drugs within reach at the time. I can certainly think of a few cases at Burning Man where I got up in the seven drug range within a forty-eight hour period, but a) heart medication was not one of them, and b) heart medication was not one of them! It makes me wonder if rock stars should have to undergo a physical screening determining how fit they are for a future of drug abuse before we the music-consuming public agree to finance their careers – \u201cYou must be able to consume x substances at once and survive<\/em> in order to ride this ride\u201d or something similar. <\/p>\n I think what\u2019s interesting here is the disparity between what the coroner considers a drug overdose and what a dilettante drug columnist considers a drug overdose. The Reuters article states that \u201cthe death was declared an accident\u201d, and I suppose that\u2019s technically true \u2013 James undoubtedly had reason to believe his heart would not explode, unless there\u2019s a secret suicide note somewhere and a video of him meticulously polishing off every drug in the house. But how is this kind of \u201caccident\u201d not an overdose? Is the coroner\u2019s spokesman honestly saying, \u201cThis man\u2019s heart just accidentally<\/em> exploded\u201d as though his arteries, like, tripped on a curb or something? Is the coroner\u2019s spokesman honestly suggesting that taking theoretically non-lethal amounts of nine different drugs at once is somehow an under<\/em>dose?<\/p>\n At any rate, this got me wondering about other interesting celebrity overdoses that I might have overlooked. Did you know, for instance, that the author Honor\u00e9 de Balzac is sometimes said to have died of a caffeine overdose from excessive coffee drinking? Some sources say it was stress or overwork that killed him, but we must put that in the context of writing sixteen hours a day for much of his life while fueled by, as Balzac described, \u201ctorrents of this black water.\u201d At that point, you begin to wonder if history is playing the same kind of trick as with James\u2019 coroner\u2019s report. \u201cIt was not a caffeine overdose,\u201d a spokesman for Balzac\u2019s coroner might have claimed. \u201cIt was exhaustion from having had to raise the mug to his lips so many times. His muscles couldn\u2019t keep up!\u201d <\/p>\n Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of drug-related celebrity deaths are as mundane as the vast majority of completely unknown drug-related deaths. It\u2019s all just \u201cleft the needle in my arm this\u201d or \u201cshot myself on Quaaludes\u201d that. Oh sure, recently a man drove home drunk and wound up decapitating his drunken best friend, who\u2019d had the misfortune of leaning out the passenger window in the presence of an oncoming telephone pole support wire. But in years to come, no one will remember this story, because the driver was not, for instance, Burt Reynolds, driving home with his unfortunate buddy Dom DeLuise. Had this horrible event occurred in Cannonball Run<\/em>, say, you would have seen Burt screaming down the highway in some fancy Corvette, shouting, \u201cHey, Captain Chaos, hand me another Schlitz!\u201d and then there\u2019d be this loud FWACK!<\/em> sound and Burt would be all, like, \u201cC\u2019mon, Captain, don\u2019t tell me all we have left is Schlitz LITE!\u201d and then, like, four states later, he\u2019d get passed by Dean Martin holding Dom\u2019s head out the window going, \u201cHey J.J., looks like he\u2019s Captain CUT MY FRICKIN\u2019 HEAD OFF now!\u201d and there\u2019d be all these blondes in the back seat giggling and stuff. That would be something people would remember. <\/p>\n It does seem fairly clear to me that, regardless of what the coroner\u2019s spokesman had to say on the subject, the story of Rick James will likely be remembered as a drug overdose. If there\u2019s some subtle medical distinction that the coroner\u2019s spokesman was trying to make when he declared James\u2019 death an \u201caccident\u201d, it\u2019s a distinction that never had a chance of making it through the filter of the media, that vast factory of over-simplification and lurid hype. If James were alive today \u2013 well, if he were, he would likely be shouting \u201cHelp, I\u2019ve been buried alive!\u201d, but if he were alive and not buried and were able to provide counterpoint to the coroner\u2019s spokesman, I bet even he would say, \u201cNo, that was definitely an overdose. I really shouldn\u2019t have taken that last Celexa.\u201d <\/p>\n But truly, the world will never know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read entertainment news fairly compulsively, even reading about television shows I will never watch and movie stars I know I detest. In this case, I was reading a recent news report about a musician I never deliberately listened to in my life \u2013 Rick James, whose recent death is old news by now. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erowid.org\/columns\/scotto\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}