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Science Forum Index » Medicine - Nursing Forum » Prescription Drugs, Not Illegal Ones, Killed Heath Ledger
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| Ilena Rose |
 Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 4:44 pm |
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Guest
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Note from Health Lover, Ilena Rosenthal
One of the many fake "skeptics" Spokesdoctors here ... Brandon C
Stahl, read this article I posted and came up with this QuackLogic
Conclusion:
"... so... are you saying to ban pain medicine? "
I cry for his patients because of his Pharma Shill ignorance.
I am for full disclosure ... not the industry's twisted purchased
unsound science.
http://ilenarose.blogspot.com
Health Lover send Happy Valentine Day Greetings
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/76961/?page=entire
Prescription Drugs, Not Illegal Ones, Killed Heath Ledger
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted February 14, 2008.
The media pounced on his admitted love of weed and coke but did little
to investigate the prescription drugs that did him in.
"This would have never happened with weed."
I made that declaration for back in May 2007, when Oxycontin maker
Purdue Pharma pled guilty to criminal charges of misleading customers
about the lethality of their product, promising to pay $600-plus
million and be real good people going forward. But with the accidental
overdose of Heath Ledger, the first sentence of this article is
proving to be a tag line with serious staying power.
Last year was the latest in a series of banner years for Oxycontin,
which kicked heroin and cocaine to the metaphorical curb to become one
of the most popularly abused substances of the 21st century. Of
course, it has been joined by painkillers like Vicodin, sleeping pills
like Restoril, anti-anxiety poppers like Valium and Xanax, and even
antihistamines like Unisom, all of which were found in Ledger's system
during his autopsy. The official verdict, sent in written form by
medical examiner spokeswoman Ellen Borakove, avoided marketing
buzzwords in favor of designations more scientific, which is to say
obscure: "Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by
the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam,
alprazolam and doxylamine. We have concluded that the manner of death
is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications."
What's in a name, you ask? Oblivion. Wait until you hear the numbers.
According to a recent Associated Press analysis of Drug Enforcement
Administration stats, retail access to these "accidental" killers has
skyrocketed 88 percent since 1997, and you don't even need to ask
about prescriptions, because doctors are dishing them out like mints.
Consequently, a collaborative study from the University of Michigan
and the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that teenage abuse of
Oxycrack has risen 26 percent since 2002, while overall prescription
drug abuse has tripled among teens since 1992. For those who know
their immortal hip-hop well, that was the year N.W.A. soundtracker and
rapper Dr. Dre scored crossover platinum with The Chronic, a highly
influential album dedicated to the love of cannabis that made Snoop
Dogg a superstar in his own right. Neither has yet to die of weed.
The irony is sweet and sour. And while I'm not sure if Heath Ledger
was a fan of Dre and Snoop, he was certainly a fan of cannabis. I
"used to smoke five joints a day for 20 years," he confessed on a
hidden camera video that Entertainment Tonight bought and planned to
air, but then reportedly pulled "out of respect" for Ledger's family.
In the video, Ledger allegedly flirts with coke and openly admits to
the problem it will cause Michelle Williams, who according to the
Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid New York Post had to lay down the law
with the Brokeback Mountain and Batman star over his abuse of not just
those drugs but heroin as well. Once the video was yanked, his family
and business associates sighed with deep thanks and quickly condemned
the former decision to air it as "shameful exploitation of the lowest
kind."
But was it? Sure, airing footage of Ledger at a Hollywood coke party
while he rhapsodizes about how much cannabis he used to smoke may not
have been the most sensitive way for Entertainment Tonight to eulogize
him. But an important point is being utterly missed: Coke, heroin and
weed did not kill him. Prescription drugs did.
And while cocaine or heroin may have been able to do the trick had he
kept abusing them, cannabis probably would have never been able to
pull the trigger: No one in the history of medicine has ever died from
an overdose of marijuana, according to evidence so far. Heath Ledger
probably could have smoked 200 joints a day and not died of an
overdose. He probably would have died of morbid obesity, if anything.
In other words, pop-culture feeders like Entertainment Tonight and The
Insider, who also pulled their planned airing, can claim sympathy for
Ledger's family all they want, but they could also claim they invented
the sun. According to some reports, ET and The Insider each paid
around $200,000 for the footage in the first place; when you spend
money like that, you expect a return on it. And it's surely not the
first time that tabloid television has had irate bystanders breathing
down their neck about propriety, further diluting the sympathy
proposition and leaving behind a more mundane reason: The video's
gotcha thrust was torpedoed by the toxicology report.
Ledger's family was unequivocally clear in their statement on the
issue, blaming not cocaine, cannabis or even heroin. Instead, they
ignored the white horse and zeroed in on the white elephant in the
room: "While no medications were taken in excess, we learned today the
combination of doctor-prescribed drugs proved lethal for our boy …
Heath's accidental death serves as a caution to the hidden dangers of
combining prescription medication, even at low dosage." And given the
alarming stats culled together by the AP, University of Michigan,
National Institute on Drug Abuse and every other organization looking
into the problem of prescription drug abuse, one would have thought
that the Bush administration would have put together some kind of task
force on the trend by now. (Stop laughing.) But no, it just caught on
to the phenomenon around the end of January 2008, when it announced
its "first major federal effort to educate parents" about Oxycrack and
its ilk.
Their chosen venue? A Super Bowl ad, which undoubtedly aired somewhere
between commercials hawking SUVs, fast food, beer and hard-dick pills.
According to the accidentally hilarious Office of National Drug
Control Policy, the Bush administration "will leverage $14 million to
generate nearly $30 million in advertising" on the dangers of
prescription drug abuse, including the hyperexpensive Super Bowl ad,
which in itself gives Americans a better idea of how their tax dollars
are spent than I don't know what. Add that together with the swollen
numbers spent by the ONDCP and the Bush administration in their
quixotic crusade against weed, Oxycrack's only serious competition for
the nation's youth, and you have one economic shell game going
nowhere. No wonder the ONDCP is now calling pot growers terrorists.
They need to spend that Homeland Security money on something, for lack
of a better term, material.
Because it's much easier to bust poor kids (or disabled adults) for
possession or cultivation of cannabis than it is to nail rich kids
rifling through their parents' medicine cabinets. As the Drug Law Blog
explained, Purdue Pharma was allowed to fraudulently market Oxycrack
for six years using everything from fake charts to doctors who like to
push the stuff too hard, all while pulling in nearly $3 billion in a
hailstorm of deaths and bad publicity. When they wanted someone to
generate better publicity, they hired Rudy Guiliani and sent the
wannabe president all the way to Congress to plead their case to keep
Oxycrack's hope alive. Those are some high-powered connections.
And they've worked wonders, even as prescription drug abuse has
reached statistical highs and, as the Ledger death has illustrated,
cultural lows. If his death is remembered for anything, it will not be
for tabloid retractions of his admitted love of weed and coke, but
rather for the spotlight his passing has placed more firmly on the
officially sanctioned pills that caused it. The world would be a
better, and healthier, place for it. |
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