All Posts Tagged Tag: ‘Drugs’
Inside Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Quiet Descent Into Addiction
People Magazine
By MICHELLE TAUBER
02/05/2014 at 08:00 AM EST
Among friends and locals in his longtime West Village neighborhood, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was known as a low-key fixture, a family man who rarely drew attention.
But in the wake of the Oscar winner’s death at 46 on Feb. 2 of an apparent heroin overdose – and an arrest of those suspected of selling him the heroin – some who knew him say Hoffman had two sides.
“He’d go over to Oliver’s restaurant with his [10-year-old] son, Cooper,” a neighborhood friend tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “They’d have lunch, and you’d see them talking and laughing for hours at a time.”
Extended Abstinence is Predictive of Sustained Recovery
The odds of remaining abstinent rise if patients have been abstinent for 1 to 3 years. After 3 years, the recovery odds remain high and stable. Therefore, as with other chronic diseases, addiction requires an ongoing and active disease management strategy.
Fentanyl-Laced Heroin Linked To Dozens Of Deaths
A Pennsylvania medical examiner reports more than a dozen people have died in recent weeks from overdosing on laced heroin thought to be sweeping the region.
Allegheny County medical examiner Dr. Karl Williams said Thursday that laboratory tests confirmed that the ultra-potent painkiller fentanyl was present in heroin samples seized in connection with at least 14 overdose deaths in Pennsylvania, according to the Pittsburgh Gazette.
Fentanyl, which is typically prescribed to cancer patients as a last resort, can be 10 to 100 times stronger than morphine, according to CNN. The laced heroin has been sold under street names like “Bud Ice” and “Theraflu.”
Williams anticipates further tests will link the laced heroin to other overdose deaths in the state. In six western Pennsylvania counties, 22 people died from heroin overdoses in the past two weeks.
“It is a marked increase… at least three or four times what we would expect,” Williams told CNN.
Deadly ‘Ace of Spades’ Heroin
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Deadly ‘Ace of Spades’ Heroin
Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead with a needle in his arm and envelopes of heroin stamped with an Ace of Spades logo. This isn’t the first time the brand has been in the news.
At approximately 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in the bathroom of his Greenwich Village apartment. He lay on his side in a t-shirt and shorts with a hypodermic needle in his left arm. According to police, five empty heroin envelopes were in the trash, and two full ones were found near his person. Some of the envelopes were branded with an Ace of Spaces logo, others with an Ace of Hearts. Whoever sold Hoffman this brand of narcotic aided in his untimely death.
He left behind his longtime partner and creative collaborator, Mimi O’Donnell, and their three young children.
Heroin, in general, has seen a major surge in the New York City-Long Island areas in recent years. On March 24, 2009, the New York field division of the Drug Enforcement Agency arrested 13 men in Long Island in a heroin-trafficking operation that moved large quantities of the drug from Elmhurst, Queens, to western Suffolk. The “ringleaders” were Gilberto “Macho” Rivera, 25, of Oakdale, and Felix Cruz, 29, of Brooklyn.
Attorney General Holder: All Drugs, Including Alcohol, Are “Potentially Harmful”
Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee Wednesday that all drugs, including alcohol, are “potentially harmful.” He was responding to a question about whether he agreed with President Obama’s recent comment that smoking marijuana was less dangerous than alcohol “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, in a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, “It’s difficult for me to conceive how the President of the United States could make such a statement.” President Obama made his comment about marijuana in an interview with The New Yorker. He told the magazine he does not think marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol. He added smoking marijuana is “not something I encourage.”
