Dave Gahan Pop Singer Arrested (The Guardian, 1996)

[demoderus]

Pop Singer Arrested
[The Guardian, 29th May 1996. Words: Uncredited.]

Dave Gahan's Overdose - 28th May 1996
A digest of small newspaper snippets breaking the news of Dave's overdose at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, Los Angeles.

David Gahan, lead singer of Depeche Mode, was under arrest last night in California after taking a drug overdose. Bail was set at $10,000 (£6,600), a detective said at West Hollywood police station, where he is being held for investigation of cocaine possession and being under the influence of heroin.

Police and paramedics were called to the Sunset Marquis hotel in Hollywood, popular with musicians, and found Gahan, aged 34, unconscious on the floor of a hotel room at 1:15 am. [1] The people with him, who summoned help, said he passed out 10 minutes after injecting a “speedball” – a mixture of cocaine and heroin. He was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and treated for an overdose, then taken to the police station and booked.

[1] - This detail clears up something that has often confused me from the way many articles report the incident. It's sometimes described as happening "on the night of 28th May" which could be taken as either "the night of 27th-28th" because it was after midnight, or "the night of the 28th-29th" and it was just very late at night. But if it caught the papers for the 29th despite LA being 8 hours behind the UK, it must have been the former.