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LETTERS FROM WAKE ROBIN FARM

The List Gets Longer

I guess I was born too soon to be a Chris Cornell fan, but this morning when my 37-year-old son delivered his baby for a morning of grandparental adoration, he confessed that his one teenage transgression had been sneaking out of the house and walking the two miles to town one night for the midnight release of Cornell’s band Soundgarden’s 1994 album “Superunknown.” Who knew? Not me.

And now Cornell is dead. It just keeps happening, doesn’t it? Every time I read an obituary without a cause of death or see the latest headline about a famous person who was “found dead,” the first question that pops into my mind is What drugs were their doctors’ prescribing them? What opioids or benzodiazepines were they struggling to get off of?

In no time at all Cornell’s unimagineably distressed wife was insisting she can’t believe her beloved husband, a guy who flew home for Mother’s Day, would have deliberately killed himself. She points out that he was on Ativan and mumbled on the phone he may have taken too many. I believe what she says about this man she knew better than anyone else, and I would bet this benzodiazepine in some way contributed to his death.

Remember when rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix shot up heroin, overdosed, and died? Now it’s all about prescription drugs, the stuff the doctors give folks supposedly to HELP them.

Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll Stevie Nicks has been outspoken about the way the gates of pharmaceutical hell opened for her. After kicking cocaine in rehab, a psychiatrist put her on Klonopin, saying it would help prevent a relapse. Ha! Instead she lost the better part of a decade, poignantly, as she puts it, the time when she might have even had a baby. She eventually recovered, but not before suffering far more damage from prescribed Klonopin than she ever did from cocaine.

It doesn’t require a history of street drug abuse to get in trouble with opioids and benzodiazepines such as Ativan, Klonopin and Xanax. I had an almost stupidly squeaky clean record on drugs, and yet, coming off of my very small, occasional dose of Xanax made even me suicidal. If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone, and this is what made me decide to tell my story in Accidental Addict. Everybody needs a heads up, not just rock stars with longstanding addiction issues.

I feel terrible for Chris Cornell’s wife. She not only has to suffer the tragic loss of her husband, she now has these people pouncing on the diagnosis of suicide, with all the judgment that goes along with it. He killed himself? Well, bad on him! How selfish! How weak!

The story—a true tragedy—is not that simple. The drugs doctors prescribe us can ruin our brains. Coming off them can turn a happy person suicidal. With no help from the medical community, I somehow managed to survive. Others don’t. Take care. Take care of the people you love. Don’t believe everything a doctor might say. They are not gods, and the drugs they are prescribing are killing people.  Read More 
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