How Heroin Kills: What Might Have Happened to Philip Seymour Hoffman
Everything about the drug—and your brain's reaction to it—conspires to do you in.
When people hear the phrase "accidental drug overdose," they naturally assume that someone mistakenly snorted, shot up, or swallowed too much. But a heroin overdose, such as the one likely suffered by the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman over the weekend, is not that simple.
A heroin overdose happens because use of the drug alters the neurons within every addict's brain—but the alterations occur in different parts of the brain at varying rates of speed. The pleasure center, increasingly hard to satisfy, is screaming "More!" But primitive centers that control breathing and heart rate are not building up tolerance at the same pace and are whispering "Enough."
"As your dosage goes up, you have a rapid tolerance to the euphoric response, but
