I have an old friend who actually broke up crying that he passed and was annoyed with me for saying there is a long standing "tradition" of dead rock stars killed by their drugs.
He vehemently argued that the guy was a tee totaler and never touched anything ever.
Hmm. Wonder how he's taking all this news about his made up hero? He's probably still wiggling out.
It took him a month to act his normal self after Frank Zappa died. At least that one had *some* merit.
Never been big on hero worship behavior. I certainly love the stories of some folk's lives and think they busted some serious ass to do impressive things, things I'm not willing to bust that much ass for, but their pedestal is never very high with me. Just people.
And I don't kid myself that they don't have real personality or other problems the PR people make disappear. Man some of them are seriously screwed up to be as driven as they are, if you get a chance to really talk to them.
A tad sorry for my friend who's watching his supposedly drug free hero go down in flames, if he's not in full denial about it. I bet he is.
We'll see when he comes out of his hole in a month or so.
I have a family member who's in the music business who claims that Prince really had cleaned up as far as drugs were concerned and was actually very much anti-drug. The problem is that I've known other people who were outwardly very much anti-drug, but who were also very much in denial of their own addictions to prescription opiates. I wouldn't be surprised if Prince also belonged to that group.
In these people's minds, there's a big difference between drugs taken for physical pain and drugs taken for the purpose of getting high. Even when they cross over to buying illegal narcotics (or buying legal narcotics illegally), they blame their doctors and/or the government for not prescribing them sufficient quantities of the drugs to keep the pain at bay.
They do have a point. As tolerance increases, narcotics can in fact become less effective at relieving chronic pain. Eventually the amounts that their doctors can prescribe without running afoul of the DEA may be inadequate to relieve the pain. Whether that point occurs before or after they become addicted to the drug itself is a coin toss. What matters to these people is that they still have pain, they know that it can be relieved by a drug, and they know that they are being prevented from obtaining enough of that drug to relieve the pain.
One of these addicts I knew was a woman who was in her late 70s. She was a client of mine and was fairly wealthy, a staunch Republican, and a reliable donor to conservative causes. Her radio was constantly tuned to the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Levin, and she had zero tolerance for "druggies" and other "low-lifes." And she was an addict. When the transdermal narcotics her doctor prescribed for her back pain no longer did the job, she obtained legal narcotics through illegal channels.
She openly admitted it to me (why, I have no idea). She didn't think there was anything wrong with it because the drugs themselves were "legal," even though she was obtaining them illegally. To her way of thinking, that was morally different from obtaining "illegal" drugs like heroin. In fact, she considered herself an activist who wanted to get the government out of people's relationships with their doctors. She blamed the government for not allowing her doctor to prescribe sufficient drugs to relieve her pain.
Frankly, I have to agree with her. She was already in her late 70s, so any concern about long-term consequences were diminished. She functioned quite well on her combination of legally- and illegally-obtained narcotics. She was able to drive, do her own shopping, attend to her own charitable and political activities, and manage her own finances. She was on the Board of Directors of several well-known charities and was the president of one of them. She also was a volunteer EMT. That was how she'd had hurt her back in the first place: lifting a patient into the rig when she was in her 70s. Even after the injury, she still drove the ambulance two days a week.
Most importantly, I never observed her robbing even a single liquor store. Not even once.
The truth of the matter is that people can function quite well while they're on narcotics, even at high doses, as long as their dosages are well-managed. The problem is that narcotics dosing can be tricky, especially when the patient has a high tolerance. And it becomes a deadly game when the patient is self-dosing because the powers that be have decided that they've crossed an arbitrary line from "use" to "abuse" of the drug, and have made it illegal for them to obtain sufficient drugs to treat their pain and/or maintain their addictions under a doctor's supervision.
If Prince did die of an accidental overdose, as is being speculated, the evidence of those who knew him overwhelmingly suggests that he overdosed on narcotics that he nominally used to manage his hip pain. If so, then I consider him another victim in this country's idiotic drug policies, which interposes cops between doctors and patients for fear that patients might become guilty of breaking the unwritten law that underlies all of our drug laws: experiencing euphoria.
Although there is no such written law, euphoria is nonetheless illegal in America. Americans are strictly forbidden from feeling any happier than the law allows. Both experiencing euphoria or assisting others to experience euphoria are crimes punishable by fines, revocation of medical licenses, or lengthy jail sentences. America has zero tolerance for euphoria.
Even if a person suffers from a medical condition that causes great pain that can be relieved only by narcotics, the concern that they might experience euphoria so outweighs their medical need for pain relief that the euphoria cops routinely interpose themselves between such patients and their doctors. They need to make sure that these people don't get too close to feeling happier than the law allows. If that means that the patients must live every moment of their lives in excruciating pain, well, those are the breaks. It's for their own protection. It's far better that they live every moment of their lives in indescribable pain than that they run the risk of feeling too happy. That must be avoided at all costs.
You think I'm kidding? Look up down the characteristics of every schedule drug. They all have one thing in common: They can induce euphoria. In fact, the quickest way to get something outlawed in America is to prove that that something can induce euphoria. It doesn't matter whether it's a pill, potion, or plant. If it induces euphoria, it must be outlawed.
We can't have people walking around feeling too happy, after all.
Rich
