The Death of Janis Joplin

3 min readMar 10, 2022

It was the year 1970, the year Janis would have turned 27 years old. She was at the height of her success, with a career on the rise. Despite the controversies with the change of musical bands, she remained at the top of the hit charts.

Janis had resumed her relationship with David a few weeks ago, when they decided to get engaged and live together in her house.

However, the relationship was shaken in April, when he discovered that she had returned to inject heroin (after a month without using), but the relationship ended for good in May 1970, when he caught Janis cheating on him with her ex-girlfriend, Cassandra.

Regretful, Janis asked him to forgive her, but he wouldn’t. Shaken and feeling alone, she fell into a deep depression, but decided not to give in to her addictions. She broke up with Cassandra, who was also a heroin user. She wanted to avoid contact with her so she wouldn’t relapse into addiction. Janis returned to psychotherapeutic follow-up and felt fine. She began seeing psychiatrists and taking the drug methadone to get rid of her addiction to heroin, the drug she used the longest and in the greatest amount.

In treatment, the artist was drug-free from May until three weeks before the date of her death. In this five-month period, she only smoked cigarettes and drank moderately. At this time she did not want to keep any serious commitments. She was focused on her career. She maintained occasional relationships with actors and singers of the time, including star Jimi Hendrix, who also died that year.

On October 3, 1970, Janis visited the Sunset Sound Recorders studio in Los Angeles, California to hear the instrumental of Nick Gravenite’s song Buried Alive in the Blues. The recording of Janis’ vocals was scheduled for the following day. In the evening, she went to the hotel, where she drank heavily and relapsed into heroin use.

On the day of recording, October 4, she did not show up at the studio. After 18 hours of her disappearance, John Cooke, the band’s manager, went to the hotel, broke down the bedroom door, where he found her dead, victim of an overdose of heroin and alcohol. Janis was lying at the foot of the bed, her mouth bleeding from the fact that before falling to the floor, she had hit the dresser. The cadaveric report confirmed that her dying position contributed to her imminent death, which is called postural asphyxia, quickly preventing oxygen from reaching the brain. In the autopsy, it was discovered that the singer had not taken methadone for a month, which contributed to her return to addiction, and that the heroin she consumed had an above-normal purity index, which in small doses quickly reaches the brain. This abnormal purity triggers an accidental error when preparing the substance for sale.

The medical report concluded that she had died from an overdose, and that there were needle marks on her left arm in the healing process, suggesting that she had been using heroin for at least three weeks.

Her body was cremated and the ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean. She left three thousand dollars in her will, where she asked her friends to have a big party on her death day, not wanting to see them sad, and they did, and the event was in the world press.