Another loss in Stevie's musical circle
 

Paul Buckmaster, who arranged the strings for Stevie on Beauty and the Beast died in November and was honored on the Grammy's tonight as part of the In Memoriam section along with Tom and others. He was just 71-- a year older than her. Tom was just 66. :angel:

And what a beautiful arrangement on that song.

That guy was a genius.

I find it interesting that right after Tom died, the press/media made a huge deal about it, saying it was an apparent heart attack. Fast forward 3 months and come to find out that Tom's death was pretty much self-inflicted with the heavy use of drugs for a broken hip and other issues (anti -depressants). They found Fentanyl, Xanax, antidepressants etc in his system on an autopsy. Sadly, Tom kept going on the last tour just to please the fans when in fact it appears that he was quite injured. Still miss you TP!!

well, the taking of the drugs was his own actions, but it caused him to have a cardiac arrest, so the actual cause of death was the cardiac arrest (i.e., his heart stopped beating). If you back the chain of events up one step, the thing that caused his heart to stop was the effect of all these drugs. So the medical responders give the true, final physical event, but that tells us nothing about how they got to that point until the autopsy etc happens......but the media takes the initial medical report and runs with all the speculation. :shrug:

I only asked because it was a BIG thing when he passed (first seemed like natural causes) & suddenly, it seems that the media suppressed the "real cause" of the heart attack which was drugs. Its no mystery that he was drug-addled for many years.

I don't think the media suppressed anything; they were told the medics responded and he wasn't breathing and his heart had stopped. It was the medical examiner who concluded all the pain meds would have caused what they saw-- the no breathing, no heartbeat-- after doing a full examination. The family was very forthcoming in putting that finding out there.

Sadly though this wasn't him taking drugs to get high or partying.. this was a senior citizen with a broken hip taking meds prescribed by his doctors for managing the pain due to the hip. Big fault on them for prescribing such meds to a person with a known history of addiction to opioids (heroin) and for giving him prescriptions of so many drugs in such high amounts. It's like giving and alcoholic a key to the alcohol cabinet and saying, just take one glass a day. :mad:

It was pain medication that was being supplemented by a synthetic fentanyl that is manufactured in China and Mexico and then smuggled into the United States.

has it been stated that he was supplementing his Rx meds with illicit meds also??

Not in so many words. The coroner's report states the list of medications he was on at the time of is death. The family followed with a statement of their own referencing the opioid crisis in America. It was an illicit substance that he was using to supplement his pain meds. The problem with the synthetic fentanyl that he was using is that it's not made under any type of supervision so the dosages can vary wildly putting the user at risk of overdose.

I think he was railing the fentanyl and other pain meds towards the end.

Apparently, they found fentanyl, which is 100 times MORE potent than heroin. We're talking something that should ONLY be taken under direct physician supervision or on the table by an anesthesiologist. Why an individual would take this is beyond me. Sadly, every time I hear a TP or TPSN song, I think about how great TP was.

" In a statement released Friday, coroner Jonathan Lucas said that Petty’s system showed signs of several opioid painkillers, including fentanyl and oxycodone, in addition to the other drugs."