How a Lethal Mix Of Drugs And Alcohol Killed Glee’s Cory Monteith
Cory Monteith‘s struggle with alcohol and drug abuse took his life on July 13 at age 31 after the combination proved to be deadly. This is not the first time a combination has proven to be lethal…so why is this combo so deadly? Lets break it down, shall we?
Cory’s autopsy results were released on July 16, revealing that he died from “mixed drug toxicity,” which included heroin and alcohol. Cory, who once said in a 2011 interview that he was “lucky to be alive,” was staying at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel in Vancouver in an area of the city a local source told us has “an open air drug market.” It had been reported that alcohol and drugs were found in the hotel room he died in.
According to the guru’s at gossip site Hollywood Life, addiction specialist Steven Orenstein, LMFT, who runs the Neurodevelopmental Learning Institute in Los Angeles, “His body could not handle the excessive amounts of toxins and it probably resulted in some type of heart failure,” Steven explains. “His body just couldn’t take it. When you poison your system to a point where it becomes toxic, it shuts down vital organs, causing death. Every time Cory combined alcohol with heroin, it was like playing Russian roulette.”
Steven said that after Cory detoxified his body and completed rehab, he was left with no tolerance for drugs and/or alcohol.
“We don’t know the amount of drugs or alcohol he was using,” Steven said. “When he got out of rehab in April, he may not have started using as heavily as he did prior to going into treatment. Probably on that Friday, he used drugs and alcohol to toxic levels, causing a lethal overdose.”
CNN‘s Dr. Sanjay Gupta also explains why the combination of alcohol and heroin is so lethal.
“Heroin is a derivative of morphine — it’s a type of morphine, so both that and alcohol, they suppress your body’s central nervous system,” Dr. Gupta said. “Your body constantly has a reflex to beat the heart on its own. When these two substances are in too high a dose, the body’s drive to breathe is hard to suppress.”
So the moral of the story?
Hugs not drugs, people….