Rapper Lil Peep died from a drug overdose on Wednesday on his tour bus, and Tuscon, Arizona police say they found paraphernalia on his tour bus suggesting he had taken the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. Peep posted a video, which you can see below, hours before his death of him dropping Xanax tablets into his mouth. He then joked that he almost ‘choked to death.’ Fans have referred to the video as his ‘death video.’
Chris Cornell was taking the anti-anxiety medication Ativan when he died by suicide in May, which Mercury News pointed out in a new article about Cornell and Lil Peep. Ativan and Xanax are both benzodiazepines, commonly referred to as benzos. The medical examiner though ruled that the drug played no role in Cornell’s death, a ruling that Cornell’s widow Vicky Cornell has disputed with the help of an attorney who specializes in insurance cases. Cornell had not taken a lethal dose of Ativan or any drugs at the time of his suicide, the amount he took (under the name Lorazepam) is available in his toxicology report. Vicky Cornell has helped raise awareness for causes that help addicts since her husband’s death, while Chris’ brother Peter Cornell has raised awareness for suicide prevention.
Chris Cornell management team member Clare O’Brien wrote in a July blog, “Chris knew all about darkness. It suffused his work and was part of the ocean he swam in as an artist. But darkness is not always destructive. It’s just the other side of light, and that nocturnal imaginative world was part of his nature. It would never have taken him away from the people and the music he loved. The alien darkness around him that night in Detroit was chemical. Drugs change brain chemistry, and I think that in the benzodiazepine delirium that engulfed him, Chris became not-Chris. And he was lost, to himself, his family, and to the world.
This isn’t the place to talk about the evils of prescription drug culture in America. And I don’t think Chris would want us to sit by the side of the road and cry. He’d want us to push on with our lives and make him proud. But I do know that the world is the poorer now that he can’t construct a future for himself, for his songs, for the wife and children he adored, and for all of us.”
