It’s an American catastrophe that has been dubbed pharmageddon, though it rarely pierces the public consciousness. Occasionally a celebrity overdose will attract attention – Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson – but they are specks in a growing mountain of human mortality.

This list reminds me that I have meant to list some university students – or recent university graduates – who have in the last few months died of pain-killer overdoses.

Austin Box, University of Oklahoma.

Robert Mueller, Wake Forest.

Wilson Forrester, University of Arizona.

Hope Reichbach, New York University.

Michael Israel, University of Buffalo.

The mother of a Purdue University student who died of heatstroke in the forests of Grand Cayman Island last week recalls his passion for reptiles. “We’ll find comfort in that, as upset as we are.”

Rescue crews had enormous difficulty reaching him.

The rescue attempt included fire and ambulance workers trekking through about two miles of bush land while carrying stretchers and other equipment to reach the man, who was believed to be suffering from hyperthermia (heat stroke). The bush was so thick that emergency vehicles could not be driven into the area.

Medical personnel stabilised the man while the Royal Cayman Islands Police helicopter was called out to attempt to pick him up.

One problem: Nowhere to land.

So firefighters used machetes and a chainsaw to clear trees and bush to create an area large enough for the chopper to touch down. The man was then carried to the helicopter to be transported to hospital.

… seems to have been alcohol-related. An investigation is ongoing.

Huffington Post, via the Miami Herald.

Gabriel Mendigutia, a student at Florida International University dared his girlfriend, Ally Castro, to shoot him in the chest with a pellet gun last week. She did, almost killing him.

Mendigutia had been been drinking beer …

From the trial of a woman just convicted of health care fraud.

[Isachi] Gil signed dozens of documents claiming that she was providing …diabetic services when, in fact, she was attending classes at Florida International University, evidence showed.

Everyone knows about the prescription drug abuse pandemic going on in the country right now, and of course universities, full of immature people experimenting with pills and alcohol, have plenty of problems along these lines.

One high-profile overdose death – a nineteen year old at the University of Arizona, the well-connected son of the Tennessee Democratic Party chair – points to the difficulties schools face in responding to the situation. Although Wilson Forrester was such a notorious user that he’d earned the nickname Blackout Willie, no one seems to have done anything about it.

The UA Police report outlines a sad tale of people who knew the student was deep into drugs and alcohol but did little more than warn him to change.

As I say in this post’s title, the University of Arizona and the local police should in response try to bust a bit of the campus drug trade. Wouldn’t hurt if UA’s president issued some sort of statement as well.

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Update: Probably another one.

… [C]ollege students with laptops spend most of their time in class reading gossip blogs and trolling Facebook….

… from the gates of the White House.

… and its expensive, successful effort to get their kid (now President Trump’s son-in-law) into Harvard. (The New York magazine article from which I got the quotation below is mainly about the jail time Papa Kushner has racked up. Money and influence can get you into Harvard, but apparently cannot always keep you out of jail.)

When Jared applied to college, Charlie was determined to get him into the most prestigious schools, and he called in favors to achieve his goal. In 1998, Charlie made a $2.5 million pledge to Harvard. According to The Price of Admission, the best-selling book written by Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, Charlie asked New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg to lobby Ted Kennedy to put in a call to Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons on Jared’s behalf.

Alex Pareene, in Salon, reviews this history in light of Trump’s attack on Obama’s Harvard admission.

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And baby, I gotta tell you. UD has been covering universities for a long time, and the big affirmative action story is Kushner’s kid at Harvard, Ralph Lauren’s kids at Duke, and scads of other money admits. The Laurens are what’s called a “development family.”

… you’re a better man than I am.

Michele Dufault, an astronomy and physics major at Yale, has been killed in a freak accident that occurred while she was using the university’s spinning lathe. Apparently her hair got caught in the machine and it pulled her in.

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A dangerous machine. This person survived because people around him turned off the machine. Was Dufault alone in the shop?

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The Yale Daily News has details.

From comments on the YDN story:

This young woman encouraged me not to give up on an astrophys course we took together, helped me as a bewildered freshman through problem sets, sent me emails to check up on how I liked this or that course, all because of her passion for what she studied and her generous nature.

… that there are universities where riots and assaults do not occur every weekend.

… has written an attack, in the Princeton paper, on the domination of formal method over theory and normative work in that department. It has generated an immense number of comments, and has been featured on the Arts & Letters Daily site.

[W]hy choose regions, why travel to places, why learn the language? Politics, after all, fits into grand narratives that can be woven by cross national regressions sitting in [the department’s] basement. Why deal with the vagaries of power when generalizable truths are only a click away? … If asked to produce something “relevant,” political scientists will shrug that this is the job of public policy or journalism. Our job, they will condescendingly argue, is to get tenure at top universities. And when we do, we will hire students who will be shaped in our own image. This decadently self-indulgent world will also self-perpetuate.

… is a disturbing event. Universities need to be alert to the possibility of contagion.

Le, a Yale graduate student, was strangled by a lab technician during the course of a “work dispute.” The technician has, since the murder two years ago, maintained his innocence; but with his trial looming he has admitted the crime.