Jackson versus Gans coroner reports

  A coroner’s announcement today about the death of Michael Jackson answers a question raised on this blog July 30 (“The wait for tox results: Jackson versus Gans”).
  The Los Angeles County coroner’s office kept the world waiting longer — 45 business days — for the toxicity report on Jackson than the Clark County coroner did for determining a cause of death for Danny Gans, which came after 27 business days.
  However, neither report was fully transparent. Apples-to-apples comparisons are risky, given that Gans’ death was ruled accidental and Jackson’s is being investigated as a homicide. But some similarities are noteworthy.
  The Associated Press reports, “The coroner did not release Jackson’s full autopsy report, citing a security hold requested by Los Angeles authorities investigating the case, and declined to comment beyond a short statement announcing the manner and cause of death.”
  As noted in the earlier post, in lieu of the Gans family’s consent to make the complete report public, the June 9 news conference became a cagey “20 questions” game of how much information Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy was legally obligated to release.
  There was no context for the bare-bones explanation: that Gans died of a toxic reaction to the opiate hydromorphone (usually sold as Dilaudid) combined with hypertensive cardiovascular disease and a condition that thickens the blood. Murphy maintained he was not obligated to say how much hydromorphone was in Gans’ system, whether it was legally prescribed, or what other drugs Gans might have had in his system if those drugs did not directly contribute to his death.
  The Jackson findings were more specific. AP reports, “Additional drugs detected in Jackson’s system were the sedatives midazolam and diazepam, the painkiller lidocaine and the stimulant ephedrine.”