Forget about adding the late Corey Haim’s name to the list of former child actors or older actors who died of a drug overdose. He and those who believed in him have now been vindicated: it turns out he died of natural causes, including heart damage and pneumonia.
A NOTE ON THAT: More than 10 years ago, while I was performing my school assembly at schools in the Marysville, Sacramento area, I felt like I was going to die on stage. No other way to explain it. I asked for a chair and told them I would have to reschedule that I felt awful and something was going to happen. They had the kids file out, and called the fire department medics. They rushed me to the hospital where it turned out I had a 104.8 degrees temperature…double pneumonia. I was hospitalized for 10 days but it actually took more than two years for my lungs to get back to normal. Pneumonia is highly perilous and it can be misleading.
Sometimes you don’t realize you had it. I had taken my foster son’s two then-small kids trick or treating (I put on an old Nehru jacket from India and a Richard Nixon mask and, since I’m five-foot-one, I collected more candy then the kids did). I drove from San Diego at 5:30 pm to Marysville and got in around 3 a.m. I was not feeling good when I left. The next day — up at 6 a.m. to get ready for the school — I had a sore throat. I was shivering in rooms that were not cold. It just felt like a touch of flu with a temperature..
The coroner’s finding won’t be any solace to Haim himself, but it will be to his family, friends and spares him being yet another child actor who wound up exiting the earth due to bad choices about drugs.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.