Another victim of the “War on Drugs”
By Mansfield Frazier
The only other actor that could possibly lay claim to being the greatest of the current generation is Robert Downey Jr., and he too was hotly pursued by devil heroin for years. Indeed, he once famously said — while standing in front of a judge about to sentence him to the slammer for drug abuse — that using heroin was “like having a double-barreled shotgun in your mouth, your finger is on the trigger, and you’re starting to like the taste of the gunmetal.”
But Downey was fortunate … he was somehow able to get straight and stay straight, at least for the nonce. Now I’m not trying to burn bread on him, but he has to know that, similar to Hoffman (who had once kicked his jones for two decades), the devil is out there lurking and can always sink his fangs into your arm again at a weak moment.
The simple fact is, there really isn’t a “cure” for opiate addiction … only remission, which in some cases, can, thankfully, last a lifetime — but sometimes not. The God’s honest truth is that once you’ve really been bitten by the addiction monster you’ll go to your grave waking up some mornings longing for just one little taste, just one more dance with the devil. Or, the feeling can creep back into your consciousness after one too many glasses of inhibitions-lowering wine.
But whatever the reason for Hoffman’s relapse, one thing is pretty certain: He probably would still be alive today if he wasn’t forced to buy his junk off the street in some dark back alley. Unlike John Belushi, who was a somewhat inexperienced drug abuser (Belushi had to have help from Catherine Evelyn Smith to tie him off and inject him with speedballs), Hoffman, by his own admission, was an experienced junkie; I’m not knocking him by using that term, since it takes one to know one. But, thankfully I haven’t used in over 20 years … but it’s not like I’ve been completely free of temptation’s siren’s song.
The toxicology report will no doubt state one of two things: The heroin was stronger than his body could handle, or that it was adulterated … most likely with fentanyl (or maybe even with rat poison). In either case, government regulated doses would have solved the problem and kept Hoffman — and countless other abusers across the country — alive long enough for them to gain enough strength to finally conquer their cravings.
The amazing thing about junkies is that, when one of them overdoses, the others immediately attempt to find out whom they copped their drugs from, so they too can score from the same source, since it “has to be some good shit.” Addiction truly addles the brain.
It’s easy for the mean-spirited and hard-hearted to sit back and smugly state that addicts are attempting to commit accidental suicide every time they pick up a gimmick and load it with a substance they know little about, other than it will get the “haints” off them. That is, until it’s one of their loved ones who takes themselves out with some bad dope.
And, given the sharp rise in the number of such deaths (which corresponds with the sharp rise in the number of abusers in every state in the Union), the likelihood of virtually every family having someone — a family member, acquaintance, or co-worker — taken out much too young grows exponentially with each passing day.
Due to the year’s long economic downturn — and a whole host of other factors — many young people have dropped out; a great ennui has settled across much of the land, and, even when times get better some young people will already be too far gone, too “out there” to find their way back until perhaps a few decades have passed. The least we can do, as a society, is to provide them with safe, regulated medications with which to drown their sorrows; after all, it’s our generation that created the conditions that caused their sorrows in the first place.
RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: The Tragic Life & Unnecessary Death of Philip Seymour Hoffman”
Cindy Meyers
A strange coincidence or not but on the same or possibly the day after I read an article about a rash of Heroin overdoses in the Northeast.