Cocaine Did Not Kill Ike Turner

Ike Turner

The ubiquitous headlines have been “Ike Turner Died of Cocaine Overdose” and the underlying articles have focused on his past recreational drug use. As usual the government and the media have twisted their presentation of illicit drug use to create a morality lesson.

Fatal overdoses from cocaine, as with other stimulants, are extremely rare. (See this post, “Drug War Myth #726,001: Cocaine Is Deadlier Than Aspirin.”) Still, cocaine greatly increases the heart rate and, similar to roller coasters, should not be used by those with weak hearts.

Also, drugs are often incorrectly blamed for suicides. Recreational drugs are a favored exit route because they are easier and more pleasurable than shooting oneself or throwing oneself off a precipice.

Less publicized than the killer cocaine angle was the fact that Turner was at an advanced stage of emphysema. According to his daughter he was on oxygen and completely spent.

He just couldn’t – he’d gone at the time of his death four or five days without doing anything, and if he’d done anything, it would have been so minimal. He was too weak from the emphysema to do anything. He’d go in the studio for a couple of minutes and play a couple of bars and say he had to go lay down.

Debilitated people often have heart attacks when using the commode because of the exertion. Do toilets get blamed? People often commit suicide by running a car in a garage. Do cars get blamed?

Turner was a lifelong musician who knew death was near and could no longer participate in his art. Close friends and family claim Turner was no longer using illicit drugs. Is it farfetched to believe Turner chose to end his life? His former drummer, Billy Ray, who was in Turner’s home when Turner was found dead said:

He was a man who knew he was going to pass away and if smoking bud or cocaine gave him solace in his final days, what difference would it be if he had a bottle of bourbon or Paxil?

Sources

1. Robert Arthur, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (2007). LINK
2. Chelsea Carter, “Cocaine Killed Ike Turner, Coroner Says,” AP, 16 Jan. 2008. LINK
3. Denis Devine & Teri Figueroa, “Ike Turner Died of Cocaine Overdose,” North Country Times, 17 Jan. 2008.LINK

Getting Outed: Kutcher Fingered the Bush Twins

Two More Bushes Get High

In compiling the lists of successful people who used illegal drugs for my book I avoided mentioning those in the modern entertainment industry. The first reason is that the arts are one of the only areas in which the admission of drug use will not cripple a career so the revelations are endless. (For sample see LINK.) Second, artists, e.g. rock stars, tend to sensationalize their drug usage to appear wild, crazy, and tormented. This tends to reinforce the stereotypes rather than break them. Third, an artist is not considered to have a “real job” by much of our populace. For those reasons I usually don’t bother noting modern artists.

In this blog entry I am going to make an exception. As comedian and talk-show host, Bill Maher, pointed out in his 2002 NORML conference address, prominent drug users need to come out of the closet. As with the early gay movement, recreational drug users cannot overcome negative stereotypes when their successful members hide. Maher proceeded to out Harrison Ford and Ted Turner in his speech. While any outing is noteworthy, the most impressive outing I know of is Ashton Kutcher’s 2003 outing of the twin daughters of President George W. Bush, Jenna and Barbara.

Kitty Kelley, the queen of unauthorized biographies, has investigated influential people – Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, Jackie Onassis, and the Royal Family – and yet she wrote that people were the most fearful to talk about the Bush clan. Add the fact that First Children are still given relatively gentle treatment by the media and it is unlikely someone was going to out young Jenna and Barbara. Enter Kutcher.

Kutcher not only outed the Bushettes, but he did it with flair. In the 2003 Rolling Stone cover story the former underwear model openly revealed his past enjoyment of marijuana. He also described attending a Los Angeles Nike party in the early 2000s in which Jenna and Barbara were in attendance. Despite the fact his friend lewdly commented, “I’d fucking nail the shit out of that bitch!,” in earshot of Secret Service agents, the Bush girls still inquired what Kutcher was doing after the party.

Everyone ended up at Kutcher’s afterwards. Kutcher revealed that the Bushes engaged in underage-drinking in his abode with the Secret Service right outside. At one point he went upstairs to his aforementioned friend’s room and in his words:

… I can smell the green wafting out under his door. I open the door, and there he is smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah.

As usual, when a celebrity says something “too” honest their public relations staff has to then attempt obfuscation. In this case, Kutcher’s spokeswoman said he was not contrite about the outing because “he didn’t say what was being smoked or who was doing the smoking.”Her statement is comical to anyone familiar with marijuana parlance. (For you east coasters, “smoking out” is the equivalent of “smoking up.”)

George W. Bush smoked marijuana and now his daughters have as well. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, except for Bush’s hypocrisy. Bush has a horrible record regarding marijuana tolerance. Despite promising in 2000 to respect states’ independence in determining marijuana policy, he has done the exact opposite, in fact the federal government under Bush has done everything in its power to prevent other countries from giving marijuana users greater liberty. LINK

Sources:

1. Gavin Edwards, “Ashton Kutcher,” Rolling Stone, 29 May 2003.
2. Kitty Kelley, The Family (2005).
3. Bill Maher, NORML 2002 Conference Address, 20 Apr. 2002. LINK (DOC file)
4. Karen Thomas, “Did the Bush twins inhale? Kutcher won’t say,” USAToday.com, 7 May 2003, ret. 15 Dec. 2007. LINK

American Gangster: Denzel & Crowe Discuss the Drug War

“That’s the way it is.”

American Gangster is about the New York City heroin trade in the early 1970s. It is based on the real-life adventures of heroin kingpin Frank Lucas (played by Denzel Washington), and police officer Richie Roberts (played by Russell Crowe). The American columnist, George Will, has called its humane portrayal of Lucas a “manipulation of viewers.” By accurately describing Lucas’s accomplishments Will writes that American Gangster,

entices viewers into the moral vertigo of forgetting the human carnage among users of the high-quality heroin that Lucas’s organizational skills enabled him to sell cheap.

Will then praises the movie for realistically showing the “suppurating needle sores” and the heroin addicted mothers passing out on filthy mattresses next to their sobbing babies.

Will, like those who only know heroin through mainstream media portrayals, cannot see past the needles and addicts. If Hamilton Wright had not hoodwinked the American Congress into criminalizing opiates in 1915 desperate heroin junkies would not exist. Opium would merely be smoked like it still is in numerous parts of South Asia. (Heroin is a more chemically potent form of opium.) It is the war on drugs that has forced the cost of opiates so astronomically high (see LINK) that those unfortunate enough to become addicted to it (just like with alcohol, a small percentage of total users LINK) cannot afford to lose any of it through the smoking process. Because of this, they must inject it directly into their veins.

Whereas Will thought American Gangster was manipulative in portraying a drug dealer as a human being, the actual manipulation occurred with the multiple gratuitous shots of needles hitting home. Lucas’s commitment to pure product, his “Blue Magic” brand, could enable people to smoke heroin and avoid the debilitating effects of injecting heroin cut with a potpourri of street substances. (Regular heroin usage is actually physically harmless. It is the side-effects of criminalization that make it dangerous. LINK)

It would also be interesting to know if Richie Roberts’ partner actually died of heroin overdose or if it was a “morality lesson” added to the script. (Apparently a lot was added. LINK) Movies and television regularly kill every heroin using character with an OD despite the mathematical absurdity of this.

In the movie, Roberts says to Lucas:

I got hundreds of parents of dead kids, addicts who ODed on your product and that’s my story for the jury. That’s how I make it all stick. This man murdered thousands of people and he did it from a penthouse driving a Lincoln.

Only someone who believes the heroin death rate portrayed on television and in the movies can hear the “thousands of people” line without laughing. In 2003 it is unlikely even 4,000 people died of any type of opiate overdose (e.g. heroin, morphine, OxyContin) in the entire country. When Nixon was declaring that drugs were a national emergency in the early 1970s more Americans were dying from choking on food or falling down stairs than from illegal drugs.

Politicians and government bureaucrats could save thousands of lives by ending the inane drug war that declares otherwise law-abiding drug users and drug dealers as public enemies. Legalizing heroin would make heroin overdoses as rare as alcohol overdoses. Legalizing would also end the countless deaths caused by drug turf wars. Whereas the government could make a difference, Lucas could not. As Lucas and Roberts discuss in the movie:

Lucas: Do you really think that putting me behind bars is going to change anything on the streets? Them dope fiends are gonna steal it. They gonna steal for it. They gonna die for it. Putting me in or out ain’t gonna change a thing.

Roberts: Then that’s the way it is.

Lucas: That’s the way it is.

Sources:

1. Robert Arthur, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (2007). LINK
2. George Will, “Another Mob Hit,” 8 Nov. 2007. LINK