When Donna Kull arrived at her son’s apartment, two police officers
escorted her up the stairs. “I remember taking a very deep breath and
looking into Adam’s bedroom,” she says. “He was lying on the floor with
blood spilling from his mouth. The officers wouldn’t let me go into the room,
as it was still a crime scene.”
(Authorities consider the scene
of a sudden, unexplained death
to be a crime scene until the
cause of death is determined
and foul play is ruled out.)
“From the doorway, I squatted
down and looked at him, tears
welling up in my eyes, shaking
my head. I said, ‘Why Adam!
Why? I can’t believe it.’ I told
him that I loved him, that I was
proud of him, and then I said
good-bye. Adam was on his
way to the medical examiner’s
office in Newark [New Jersey]
and I had to get home to tell
my family.” Like Donna Kull,
the authorities suspected
that Adam Kull had died of a
drug overdose. The medical
injured on the job. An unemployed coal miner in West Virginia using heroin
because it’s cheaper than the prescription painkillers he took for his back
pain. Celebrities such as Prince and Michael Jackson, who both started
taking prescription painkillers for legitimate reasons, became addicted,
and eventually died from overdoses. And twenty-seven-year-old Adam Kull,
a top wrestler and soccer player in high school who became addicted to a
prescription medication for anxiety and then to heroin.
Michael Jackson died in 2009 after his physician, Dr.
Conrad Murray, injected him with the surgical anesthetic
propofol, which Murray routinely used to help Jackson
sleep. Jackson’s years of addiction to Xanax and opioids
likely contributed to his death. Jackson’s addiction to
prescription painkillers dated back to 1984, when he
suffered serious scalp burns while filming a commercial.
6
Addiction and Overdose
