As if, suddenly confronted by the inexorability of overdose, they all put those needles down in shame. As if there weren’t junkies with needles in their arms as they read the news about Hoffman. As if the thing that stands between an addict and sobriety is the intellectual revelation of the consequences, as if heroin users are operating under the misapprehension that it’s good for them. “Don’t forget: heroin is bad for you! If you take it and die, people will be sad!” As if that was the lesson here. Rather, in the last few days, I’ve found myself resentfully fixated on the far more well-intentioned outcry of friends and fans who have not known addiction in their own life, saying things like “Remember, guys, it’s never worth it.” Those old tropes are too tired and obtuse to take too seriously. The knee-jerk sanctimony - from “this isn’t a tragedy, he brought it on himself” to “how could he do this to his children” and “how could someone so successful throw it all away?” - are almost easier to deal with. The last few days, I’ve seen an outpouring of sentiment on social media, and between the expressions of disbelief and endless clips from Boogie Nights and Capote, I’ve seen those who have not known addiction in their own lives attempt to make sense of what happened and offer their take on what we should “learn” from this. Addict does, but only in an obvious, unsatisfying way.įairly or not, it bothers me when people try. There aren’t words for the stubborn fits of that desire. That’s why, despite being off heroin for nearly seven years, I still have a moment that comes every time the season turns when some part of me wants nothing more than to get high. Call it stupidity or selfishness or demons - really, it just is, in a way our language is ill equipped to explicate. But these things cannot shake the memory, not really. It’s why a majority of addicts relapse within the first six months of treatment it’s why first-year Twelve Step dropout rates top 95 percent. Usually it’s just that heroin is the best you’ll ever feel, and nobody feels that way once and says, “Okay, that was fun. It isn’t existential dread, or reckless abandon, or even some devilish seduction. Many of us, especially in youth, experiment with the world’s wide array of narcotics. Most times, the confluence of circumstances don’t tend toward the dramatic. Maybe that’s what happened here, but I doubt it. When we try to imagine the scene, we conjure up pictures of the wrong room and the wrong stress tumultuous men brought low by vulnerability in the face of fear and loneliness.
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We imagine addiction as a voluntary act, romantic or tragic, depending on our mood. I don’t know what demons might be to blame, but as a one-time junkie, I do know that the demons hardly matter. I don’t know why Philip Seymour Hoffman was an addict. Rather, I want to talk about the reaction about the conversation that’s begun this week and which will no doubt continue in the weeks to come about this old story that we tell whenever someone dies this way. I don’t come to bury Hoffman, or to praise him: for that, I suggest Derek Thompson’s beautifully rendered essay in The Atlantic.
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Perhaps it doesn’t go without saying that Hoffman was unparalleled among his peers, or that we have lost who knows how many roles he still had in him, but by now it has certainly been said. How could he leave his kids without a father? How could he be so stupid or so selfish?īut if we’re going to talk about embarrassment, we should remember that nobody would be more ashamed than Hoffman to see his own body, cold on a bathroom floor. It’s a shame he had to go this way it’s a regrettable loss. Now he’s dead.Įmbarrassment seems to be the major theme.
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It appears that despite a stint in rehab last spring, Hoffman, like so many other lifelong addicts, relapsed. On Sunday, the body of Philip Seymour Hoffman was discovered in his Manhattan apartment with a needle in his arm. “I CAN’T TELL YOU if I’ll start back up,” President Dwight Eisenhower once said of cigarette smoking, “But I’ll tell you this: I sure as hell ain’t quitting again.”