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Tag: drug overdose death

  • Slipknot Drummer’s Daughter Dies Days After Posting Sobriety Chip

    Slipknot Drummer’s Daughter Dies Days After Posting Sobriety Chip

    Her family asks that people not pry and speculate during their time of mourning.

    Gabrielle Crahan, the youngest daughter of Slipknot drummer Shawn Crahan, has died at 22 years old. Her sudden passing came just days after she shared a photo of her five month sobriety chip on Instagram.

    “FIVE MONTHS,” Gabrielle wrote in the caption of her photo of the red Alcoholics Anonymous chip.

    Shawn, who is known as “clown” in Slipknot, shared the news on the band’s official Instagram account.

    “It is with a broken heart, and from a place of the deepest pain, that I have to inform all of you that my youngest daughter, Gabrielle, passed away yesterday – Saturday May 18th, 2019. She was 22 years old,” he wrote alongside a black-and-white photo of Gabrielle. “Funeral arrangements will be forthcoming. My family and I ask that our privacy be respected moving forward. Thank you. Much love, clown.”

    Gabrielle’s older sister, Alexandria, also shared words of mourning. Posting a childhood photo of herself and Gabrielle, she lamented the loss.

    “Yesterday my little sister Gabrielle passed away. I am in shock and have no idea how to process the wave of emotions I am experiencing. The comforts I have in these moments are my family, friends, and cats,” she wrote. “Please put good energy out for my parents and my brothers. This loss leaves the biggest hole and our lives will never be the same. 22 is too young to die.”

    Alexandria also took it upon herself to combat the prying questions around whether Gabrielle died of an overdose or suicide.

    “She died yesterday. Stop speculating stop with the assumptions if you’re going to be negative, leave my family alone,” Alexandria wrote.

    Gabrielle’s actual cause of death has not yet been made public knowledge.

    This is not the first time that members of Slipknot have been affected by addiction. The band’s lead sober singer, Corey Taylor, has long struggled with addiction, as he’s shared before. Paul Gray, Slipknot’s bassist, tragically died of an overdose in 2010. Gray’s doctor was eventually held accountable for enabling Gray’s Xanax addiction.

    “I just knew it was his drug of choice, that he’d struggled with it,” said his widow, Brenna Gray. “So I just wasn’t really sure why he was on it, why he needed it along with the medication he was taking for addiction.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Mass Overdose In California Leaves One Dead, 12 Hospitalized

    Mass Overdose In California Leaves One Dead, 12 Hospitalized

    “Every indication is that this mass overdose incident was caused from the ingestion of some form of fentanyl in combination with another substance,” said a police chief at the scene.

    The synthetic opioid fentanyl is most likely responsible for a cluster of overdoses in one Chico, California house. One person died after overdosing and four are in critical condition; a total of 12 people were taken to the hospital. 

    According to NPR, Chico police are fairly sure the mass overdose was caused by the use of fentanyl, in combination with another substance.

    “Every indication is that this mass overdose incident was caused from the ingestion of some form of fentanyl in combination with another substance. That is yet to be confirmed, but we do anticipate confirmation in the coming days,” Chico Police Chief Michael O’Brien said.

    According to Anna Lembke, MD, fentanyl (a synthetic opioid pain reliever) can be 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin. Lembke gives this chilling example: “If you ingest a ‘bag of heroin,’ which is typically 100 mg of heroin, and that bag contains 20% pure fentanyl in place of heroin, you will be ingesting the rough equivalent of 2,000 mg of heroin, enough to kill even a highly tolerant user.”

    Chico Fire Department Division Chief Jesse Alexander said it was the largest mass casualty incident he had seen in years, with six people receiving CPR simultaneously.

    Chief O’Brien reported on the crime scene. “Upon arrival, Chico police officers found multiple individuals in what appeared to be life-threatening, overdose conditions. . . . Officers began to both administer CPR and also naloxone to those individuals. . . . Unfortunately one male individual was pronounced dead at the scene.”

    Chico officers began carrying naloxone on their person one year ago, according to CNN, and in this case lives were saved with the opioid-reversing drug. Police Chief O’Brien reported that officers administered CPR and six doses of naloxone.

    After working the crime scene, two officers reported feeling fentanyl-like symptoms from possible exposure and were treated and later released from a local hospital.

    The Chico Enterprise-Record reported that all of the people hospitalized were over the age of 18, with most of them appearing to be in their 20s. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that in 2017 there were more than 72,000 drug overdose deaths, with the sharpest increase seen among deaths related to fentanyl and fentanyl analogs (synthetic opioids) for a staggering total of nearly 30,000 overdose deaths. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Jada Pinkett Smith Gets Candid About Father's Addiction Struggles

    Jada Pinkett Smith Gets Candid About Father's Addiction Struggles

    “Once he did get sober, he was really a gentle soul. Now that I’m older, I have so much more compassion in knowing what he had gone through,” said Jada Pinkett Smith about her late father.

    Actress Jada Pinkett Smith opened up last week with tough memories about her father and his struggle with addiction before his 2010 death from a drug overdose, according to USA Today.

    Joined by her mother, daughter and half-brother Caleeb, Pinkett Smith delved into the “shared source of pain” during her Facebook Watch show Red Table Talk, which drew more than 5 million views in less than a week. 

    “He told me at 7, ‘I can’t be your father. I’m a criminal, I’m an addict and that’s just what it is,’” the 47-year-old Matrix actress said. Growing up, she said, Robsol Pinkett Jr.’s addiction was a source of resentment for the rest of the family.

    “We had that feeling like we had to be responsible for him,” Pinkett Smith said, “but he never had to be responsible for us, and that was a hard pill for me to swallow.”

    For years, the family weathered his abusive behavior, even when at times he was “typically drunk,” Pinkett Smith said. Eventually, though, he sobered up. 

    “Once he did get sober, he was really a gentle soul,” she said. “Now that I’m older, I have so much more compassion in knowing what he had gone through.”

    Then, just before his death, the actress and her father got in a fight.

    “The most difficult part of him dying like that is because he and I had had a horrendous fight when I found out that he relapsed,” she said. “I was like, ‘I don’t owe you nothing. You didn’t do shit for me, you didn’t do shit for Caleeb. I don’t owe you nothing.’ It was one of those.”

    It was only after he died that Pinkett Smith and her siblings were able to find forgiveness. 

    “I had the most startling realization that Rob’s life wasn’t about him being my father,” she said. “Rob’s life was about Rob being on his journey, and it just so happened along the way that he gave me life.”

    It was an “aha” moment, she said.

    “I realized he was not born to be my dad,” she explained. “That wasn’t the only thing he was here to do. He’s a person first, with his own journey.”

    View the original article at thefix.com