CHICAGO TRIBUNE: Former Wilco member Jay Bennett died of an overdose of a painkiller, the Champaign County coroner said Tuesday, and his office is investigating Bennett’s death as an accident. Tests showed Bennett died from fentanyl, a drug often prescribed to treat chronic pain, said the coroner, Duane Northrup. Bennett, who died May 24 at his home in Urbana, had posted a few weeks earlier on his MySpace site that he would need hip-replacement surgery. “A decade plus of multiple nightly stage jumps and various other rock and roll theatrics had finally taken a toll that I could no longer merely deal with or ignore,” he wrote, but added that he did not have health insurance to cover costs of the surgery.[…] PriCara, a division of Johnson & Johnson recalled fentanyl patches in 2008 after discovering that some leaked, causing labored breathing and possible overdose. There was no indication that Bennett used such a patch. MORE
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