This is fascinating:
A top toxicologist in the Netherlands said Monday that he believed that Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader, had been manipulating medication to fake a medical condition, a ploy that contributed to his ill heath and may have played a role in the heart attack that caused his death.
That theory was advanced by Dr. Donald Uges, professor of clinical and forensic toxicology at the University of Groningen, who suggested that Mr. Milosevic had been seeking to demonstrate that Dutch doctors could not cure him and that he should therefore be allowed to seek treatment, and freedom, in Moscow.
***Dr. Uges based his theory on his detection in Mr. Milosevic’s blood of a drug that had not been prescribed for him and that was not only inappropriate but, under the circumstances, dangerous. Mr. Milosevic, who had complained days before that he was being poisoned, was found dead on his bed in his prison cell on Saturday morning.
The drug at issue is a powerful antibiotic known as rifampicin, used to treat serious bacterial infections like tuberculosis, leprosy and Legionnaire’s disease. Rifampicin, detected in Mr. Milosevic’s blood as recently as two weeks ago, is known to interfere with medications he was taking for high blood pressure.
***Other investigations are still going on. The Dutch police and the United Nations tribunal where Mr. Milosevic was on trial for four years are carrying on their own investigations into his abrupt death.
The discovery of the antibiotic in Mr. Milosevic’s blood has raised a number of questions, including who brought it into prison and how it ended up in Mr. Milosevic’s system.
Something for the conspiracy theorists to wonder about for the next 50 years, although in the long run, Milosevic will probably not be remembered at all. I do wonder how someone could have sneaked something in to a modern prison- but it does happen every day in our prisons here in the US. The first thing I thought of when I read this was the story was Herman Goering’s suicide.