What a Life This Man Had

Tweet

I watched a documentary about Howard Hughes last night and found him to be quite an eccentric. Talk about being unconventional and slightly strange. He was both. He was born in 1905 and received an inheritance of several million which he turned into about 11 billion with his many business ventures. He was an investor, business magnate, film director, philanthropist, record-setting pilot, and engineer. He was famous for dating all the loveliest Hollywood movie stars of the day. In 1946 he was in a terrible airplane crash which left him in a lot of pain. He began taking codeine for that pain and became addicted. In the last twenty years of his life, he was a total recluse. He had developed what he called a nerve center that consisted of about eight businessmen called the Mormon Maffia. These men took over his business at one point and renamed it, Summa. Two doctors kept him in codeine and valium, one even bought the codeine from a pharmaceutical company in New York. Near the time of his death, he was comatose most of the time and had multiple seizures. He was not seen by any reputable doctors until his death in 1976. That doctor found him emaciated and only about 93 pounds with broken off needles in his body. He had been taking 35-45 grains of codeine daily when a normal daily dose would be 360mg. which equals 0.36 grains. (A milligram is 1/1000 th of a gram.) Two doctors were indicted. One pleaded no contest and the other was found not guilty of any charges. The two doctors had been making $60,000 yearly for doing next to nothing, just keeping him well dosed.