I haven’t devoted a whole post to Heath Ledger since he died, despite all the speculation into the whys and the wherefors. I enjoy celebrity gossip with the same sense of guilty pleasure we all have, but the Ledger stuff always left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I won’t take a moral high ground and call it “disrespectful,” but it made me feel icky. I didn’t like it. So I didn’t participate.

Despite all the misconceptions and bizarre theories, I didn’t make too much of an effort to disspell them. After all, I’m just a voice in the wilderness. Nobody’s listening. I bit my tongue while people insisted that playing the Joker had someone pushed him over the edge, a speculation that - as Christian Bale stated firmly when asked - shows a complete lack of understanding what being an actor is all about. I seldom bothered to point out that Ledger was never shown to be suicidal, that he loved his daughter, and that Ambien - one of the pills that was found in his system - can cause amnesia. On a call-in medical show, I once heard a woman describe how she woke up in the emergency room, confused. They told her she had taken an entire bottle of Ambien. She didn’t recall taking a single one.

I’ve heard of people on Ambien having dreams that there is a tick in their skin they must burn out. They’ve woken up standing in the bathroom, burning their skin with a lighter. My fiancé’s Ambien experience was slightly tamer, though he inexplicably discovered upon waking that he’d taken an X-Acto knife and carved the eyes out of some action figures. It’s scary stuff and it’s not fully understood how it works. What we do know is that it can make you forget you’ve already taken a pill.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the Ledger news, you might not know that Mary-Kate Olsen was recently under investigation by the feds for somehow being involved. You see, Ledger did not have a prescription for the Oxycontin that was found in his system. The feds want to know where it came from. Since the Olsen girl was the first person called upon the discovery of the body, perhaps they suspected she might be his candy(wo)man.

Does it really matter? Drugs can be obtained both legally and illegally, and they can be dangerous either way. The Oxycontin didn’t kill him. Who cares?

Not the DEA, anymore.

The investigation has been dropped. This is good news, and I hope it will allow us to put this discussion aside once and for all.

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