Robert Palmer was a cocaine head in the late seventies and eighties. Like lots of people (e.g. Bowie in his pre-Berlin phase, Parfitt and Rossi from Status Quo, Parfitt now has multiple bypasses for it). Because it was perceived as a "clean" drug, people thought they would get away with everything and that the most serious repercussion was psychological addiction. Not so. While contaminated heroin has a better chance of killing you than contaminated cocaine, it is almost unheard of that a former heroin junkie dies, say, 15 years after his last heroin hit without having taken the drug again. Your body seems to recover from it once you are and stay clean. In contrast, with cocaine, your heart muscle seems to have a very long memory. It always makes me wonder how ex-cocaine abusers must feel when they read of another heart attack death of someone known to have (ab)used the stuff.
