Heath Ledger, Accidental poisoning?

Unless it's your pet Lab that will enthusiastically eat the wall board with a pillow for dessert, no one accidentally takes oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, tempazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine, all found in the system of Heath Ledger. Heath made choices along the way to anesthetize his brain and emotions.

I had a comment yesterday from someone who read an entry of mine about marijuana. He/she insisted that after using 20 years, it simply had no impact on his mind, and wasn't a gateway drug. Of course, he mentioned that the Iraq War had been running for 8 years, so it had impaired his math ability a bit, because that would mean President Clinton lead us into it--which he did sort of with all the hype about WMD, but that's another blog. He also had forgotten how to use capital letters. How hard can it be to use the shift key?

Most of these deaths aren't happening to star struck actors, they are happening to young white women. Poisoning mortality rates in the U.S. rose 62.5% during the 5-year period 1999 to 2004. 20,950 deaths in 2004 alone, up from 12,186 in 1999. The largest increases were among females (103.%), whites (75.8%), persons living in the southern U.S. (113.6%), and persons aged 15-24 years (113.3%). Among all sex and racial/ethnic groups, the largest increase (136.5%) was among non-Hispanic white females. So what's that include? Overdoses of illegal drugs and legal drugs taken for nonmedical reasons, legal drugs taken in error or at the wrong dose, and poisoning from other substances (alcohol, pesticides or carbon monoxide).

You can't slowly poison your brain cells with alcohol, marijuana or pain meds, and expect it to then indefinitely make the correct decisions on other drugs that become available, maybe because you lied to the doctor or the pharmacist to get a bigger high or low.