9781422274286

1 CHAPTER

Who Uses Painkillers? Shortly after 1 pm on January 22, 2008, in an apartment in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Heath Ledger’s housekeeper Teresa Solomon heard the twenty-eight-year-old actor snoring. This seemed like good news, as Ledger had told family and friends that he was having trouble sleeping. The problem had begun a few months earlier, around the time he finished filming what would become one of his most famous roles—the disturbing and deranged villain Joker in The Dark Knight . At 2:45 pm, Ledger’s massage therapist Diana Wolozin arrived for a scheduled treatment. She found the actor in bed, his body cold and unresponsive. Heath Ledger was never going to wake up again. An autopsy determined that Ledger had died after taking several powerful drugs, including the painkillers OxyContin and Vicodin, and the sedatives (sleeping aids) Xanax and Valium.

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Who Uses Painkillers?