He died, by all accounts, an addict’s death, with periods of outward normalcy interrupted by erratic behavior. Shooting a blockbuster film. Business meetings. Ballgames. Binge drinking. Drug buys.
As much as it was reason to mourn the man and reflect on his body of work, the unexpected passing of Philip Seymour Hoffman earlier this week called into question how we treat addicts and addiction in society. The Atlantic has reported that drug overdose deaths have been on the rise in the United States, with a 102 per cent increase reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1999 and 2010 – while the rate of infection amongst injecting drug users can be as high as 33 per cent.
(Drug overdose deaths do occur in New Zealand, but far more infrequently, as I found in reporting my feature on emergency responses to overdoses for the New Zealand Drug Foundation’s Matters of Substance magazine a few years ago – and last month, our own Megan Whelan asked how we should treat addiction in our own law.)
While there’s increasing willingness amongst U.S. police officers and paramedics to carry and administer Naloxone, a so-called “miracle drug” that has the power to reverse overdoses, it’s a response, not a preventative measure. One proposal is to lessen the risk of overdose and infection for addicts is to make the injection of heroin as safe as possible, but, in a world where “junkies” are infrequently met with compassion, part of the problem is recategorising the problem as an illness, and addicts as sufferers deserving of empathy and support.
Comedian-cum-cultural commentator Russell Brand, a high-profile critic of the treatment of addicts as criminals and a recovering addict himself, tweeted a link to an opinion piece he wrote for The Guardian in the wake of Amy Winehouse’s death after news of Hoffman’s passing:
In a follow-up published on Thursday, Brand described Hoffman as a victim of "extremely stupid drug laws", where addiction is a legal issue, not a health one:
If drugs are illegal people who use drugs are criminals. We have set our moral compass on this erroneous premise, and we have strayed so far off course that the landscape we now inhabit provides us with no solutions and greatly increases the problem.
Of course, one death can’t stand in for many, and, as much as his death might have prompted a rallying cry for a change in attitudes towards addiction, Philip Seymour Hoffman was a father, partner, son and sibling, as well as how the vast majority knew him, and will remember him: an actor. The Wireless’ Adam Goodall wrote a thoughtful, sensitive piece about what Philip Seymour Hoffman meant to him when he was a 16-year-old, growing up in a small town outside of Palmerston North.