When a public figure passes away under abnormal circumstances, everyone immediately thinks the worst. When a public figure with a history of substance abuse passes away under abnormal circumstances, everyone immediately starts to question their sobriety.
The public figure in question today is Rodney King. He passed away earlier this week. He was 47 years old.
King was well-known for the severe beating he endured at the hands of the LAPD. The shocking footage, caught on tape in the early 90s, led to vocal and fairly accurate calls of police racism. It also led to a trial of the officers involved.
The police officers in question were acquitted and this miscarriage of justice sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots – some of the largest, most costly, and most deadly riots in our country’s history.
Rodney King’s Tragic Life
Fast forward several years and King was struggling both physically and mentally. Physically, he was dealing with enduring migraines, joint pain, and other ailments. Mentally, he was dealing with PTSD and substance abuse. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that King had been arrested several times after his initial arrest and beating. While these arrests were no doubt warranted (his charges ranged from spousal abuse to DWI to drug possession), they can’t have been easy for him to deal with. They certainly compounded any underlying trauma or mental health issues King was grappling with and made him turn to chemicals even harder.
In 2008, King entered rehab for the second time (the first was in 1993). During his stint in treatment, King was on the show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew and told the world he’d once believed that “if you’re not drunk by 10am, you’re not human.”
While it’s not certain how long King stayed sober for, he was arrested in early 2011 for reckless driving. Chemicals weren’t thought to be involved, but his death due in part to substance abuse the following year raised a host of questions.
It’s worth noting that while King had more than his fair share of struggles, his life wasn’t all doom and gloom. His arrest and subsequent abuse at the hands of police sparked an in-depth and prolonged look at police brutality and the treatment of race in matters of arrest. Towards the end of his life, King became engaged to Cynthia Kelly and was, by many accounts, pursing an idyllic life.
He once stated,
Some people feel like I’m some kind of hero. Others hate me. They say I deserved it. Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I’m a fool for believing in peace (BBC).
Fool or not, it’s clear that Rodney King managed to accomplish a lot in a short life shadowed by trauma and chemical dependency.
An Early Death
Which brings us to King’s 2012 death. He was found lying in the bottom of his swimming pool, unconscious, early in the morning of June 17th. He was rushed to a local hospital and pronounced dead soon thereafter.
While the official cause of death was accidental drowning, King’s autopsy reveal he had a host of drugs in his system, including alcohol, pot, cocaine, and PCP. He had fallen off the wagon for good this time.
Part of his autopsy read as follows,
The effects of the drugs and alcohol, combined with the subject’s heart condition, probably precipitated a cardiac arrhythmia and the subject, thus incapacitated, was unable to save himself (CNN).
King’s life, marred by addiction, was in the end taken away by this very same condition. While tragic, there’s a lesson we can learn from his death.
There’s an old recovery saying that goes a little something like “the disease of addiction ends in jails, institutions, and death.” Rodney King, struggling with this disease, ended up in both jails and institutions. He then got sober and improved his life, but addiction’s a chronic, relapsing disease and, when King returned to it, he ended up in the final of these three options – death.
He didn’t have to relapse. In fact, no addict does. Still, it happens to many of us and when it does, it never ends well. Rodney King’s life is tragic proof of this simple fact. Let’s take his death and use it to remind all those struggling with addiction that the stakes are, quite literally, life or death.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons