The Clark County Coroner, Mike Murphy, announced last month that Danny Gans' May 1 death was accidental, the combined result of pre-existing health issues, including an elevated red-blood-cell count and heart problems, and toxic levels of hydromorphone, also known as dilaudid. The medical examiner took tissue and microscopic samples during the autopsy; it took six weeks to receive the results from the laboratory.
Dilaudid is a highly powerful and controlled prescription opiate, one of whose nicknames is "drug-store heroin." It's used to treat chronic pain. As a side note, the cause of death of Elvis Presley was also attributed to an accidental overdose of dilaudid, which is up to eight times more potent than morphine. It’s so potent, in fact, that it’s rarely prescribed outside of a hospital.
The coroner reported that Gans had hypertensive cardiovascular disease and suffered from high blood pressure and thickened heart tissue. Gans also had polycythemia, which produces more red blood cells than necessary and thickens the blood.
Though the coroner indicated that Gans’ death was accidental, with no indication of drug abuse, some observers noted that this explanation raises more questions than it answers. One addiction specialist told the Las Vegas Sun that he didn’t "understand how Gans could have suddenly died if the drugs were prescribed responsibly and taken as the doctor ordered." He added, "The key thing is: How come it happened that night? You’ve got to figure he took more than he usually takes to cause this reaction."
A medical doctor who specializes in pain management told the Sun that it’s "definitely unusual" that Gans died that way, "especially if dilaudid is not new to him, if he's not opiate naive."
If Gans took more dilaudid than was prescribed, it was an overdose. If he took the drug as prescribed, then it was a doctor error.
One pundit summed it up this way, "I’ve never seen a coroner go so out of his way to not say that someone died of a drug overdose, accidental or otherwise."
There was some speculation that perhaps Gans’ toxic reaction to the dilaudid wasn’t accidental. However, the coroner's office can rule a death in one of five different ways: natural, accidental, homicide, suicide, and undetermined. And the coroner ruled out suicide, though he didn’t state how he knew it wasn’t.
Reports indicate that the Gans family is "at peace" with the coroner’s ruling, so no further inquiries will be made. Thus, it’ll probably never be known if the death of Danny Gans was accidental, suicidal, or due to some form of physician malpractice.
