BREAKING NEWS: Marilyn Monroe and the precise prescription drugs that was used to killed her. Alleged conspiracy!!
If headlines could scream, then scream they did in early August 1962. According to nearly every newspaper, television, and radio broadcast in the world, early on Aug. 5, Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s brightest star, was found dead in the bedroom of her Brentwood, Los Angeles home. She was only 36.
Long before the opiate and opioid epidemics struck American life with such resounding force, there were plenty of other prescription drugs abused to excess with deadly results.
On Marilyn’s bedside table was a virtual pharmacopoeia of sedatives, soporifics, tranquilizers, opiates, “speed pills,” and sleeping pills.
The vial containing the latter, a barbiturate known as Nembutal, was empty.
In her last weeks to months, Marilyn was also consuming, if not abusing, a great deal of other barbiturates (amytal, sodium pentothal, seconal, phenobarbital), amphetamines (methamphetamine, Dexedrine, Benzedrine and dexamyl—a combination of barbiturates and amphetamines used for depression), opiates (morphine, codeine, Percodan)
The sedative Librium, and alcohol (Champagne was a particular favorite, but she also imbibed a great deal of Sherry, vermouth and vodka).
Her last two pictures, “Let’s Make Love” (1960) and “The Misfits” (1961), were commercial flops. The latter, written by her husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller, served as the breaking point in their marriage and the two were divorced shortly after “wrapping” that film.
During this period, Monroe suffered from several mental health problems, including substance abuse, depression, and, most likely, bipolar disorder, along with physical ailments such as endometriosis and gall bladder disease.
On June 8, 1962, the Hollywood film factory, 20th Century Fox, fired her while she was filming the ironically titled “Something’s Gotta Give”, (a remake of the 1940 film “My Favorite Wife”).
The cause, the studio claimed, was her “unjustifiable absences.”
Marilyn protested she was too sick to work while the studio moguls complained she was apparently well enough to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at John F. Kennedy’s famous soiree in New York’s Madison Square Garden on May 19.
This very public firing was an ignominious end for a superstar whose films had grossed more than $200 million during a relatively brief career.
Lonely and harassed, Marilyn found getting to sleep especially difficult.
To counteract her insomnia, she often cracked open a Nembutal capsule (so that it would absorb faster into her bloodstream), added a chloral hydrate tablet (an old fashioned sedative better known in detective stories as a “Mickey Finn,” or “knockout drops,”), and washed them both down with a tumbler of Champagne.
This is a particularly lethal cocktail, not only because each of these drugs increase, or potentiate, the power of the other, but also because people who take this combination often forget how much they previously consumed, or whether they took them at all, and soon reach for another dose.
