Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death at age 46 shocked the U.S. on Sunday, and as the investigation reveals more details about his death — strong evidence points to a heroin overdose, as he was found in his Manhattan apartment with a needle stuck in his arm — many voices have contributed to the discussion of his legacy as a fine actor and his struggle with drug abuse.
Artistic brilliance is too often coupled with addiction. Famed Beat writer Jack Kerouac used amphetamines to stay up for days at a time and write. It’s common knowledge that Ernest Hemingway was an alcoholic. The Beatles — before experimenting with LSD in the later years — abused speed in the form of phenmetrazine diet pills in their early years in Hamburg. The great Billie Holiday’s heroin addiction led to legal trouble and imprisonment.
“Mr. Hoffman’s gifts were widely celebrated while he was alive,” A.O. Scott wrote for The New York Times. “But the shock of his death on Sunday revealed, too soon and too late, the astonishing scale of his greatness and the solidity of his achievement. We did not lose just a very good actor. We may have lost the best one we had. He was only 46, and his death, apparently from a drug overdose, foreshortened a career that was already monumental.”
According to the Washington Post, Hoffman struggled with drugs from a young age.
“‘I got sober when I was 22 years old’ and went into a drug rehabilitation program at the time, Hoffman told CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ in 2006. Asked whether he abused drugs or alcohol, Hoffman said: ‘It was all that stuff. Yeah. It was anything I could get my hands on. Yeah. I liked it all.’”
He relapsed in 2012 after being clean for 20 years.
Heroin use is growing, the Washington Post reported. In 2012, a federal survey found the number of people in its sample who said they’d used heroin in the last month had nearly doubled since 2007, proving that heroin isn’t the fringe drug it used to be. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration attributed the increase to more pure and less expensive heroin now available on the market and to the crackdown on prescription painkillers, making drugs like OxyContin harder to acquire.
In 2010, the DEA reported 3,038 people overdosed on heroin that year, a sharp increase from 1,879 in 2007. Heroin kills many first-time users, the Washington Post reported, because it shuts down bodies’ natural breathing reflexes.
This week, Hollywood lost a tremendously talented actor. We only hope that through this tragedy, substance abusers can find the strength to seek help.
“He had a rare ability to illuminate the varieties of human ugliness,” Scott wrote in closing his Times article. “No one ever did it so beautifully.”
If you or someone you know is using heroin, please use the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s online resources to seek help, or call 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 2/4/2014 under the headline "Nation mourns Hoffman death, examines heroin use"]
