Reply #181: there's an interesting essay on this subject [View All]

[foo_bar]

I've never thought that there was even the slightest chance that he willingly took his own life.

Well, listen the fuck up, everybody. Especially those of you from the J-School who shared this network with Gary and me and scores of others: Society doesn’t allow us to talk about suicide. Fuck society. I’m going to talk about it now.
(...)
Yes, motherfuckers, I know something about suicide. I have thought about it every day since I was 23 years old, when I began to see my pal Abbie slip into his depths. Twenty-one years is a long time to decide each day not to kill myself. I have made the decision thousands of times. So far, the coin has not once flipped tails.
(...)
In 1989, my mentor Abbie Hoffman, knowledgeable in pharmacology, downed 120 phenobarbitols with a glass of Glen Livet, a dosage that would stop the beating heart of any man or woman. A lot of people still don’t believe it. That Abbie would kill himself fucks with their views of “reality.” But I tell you: He did it! He left a fucking note! Just because the note was so private and personal that you’ve never seen it (and probably never will) can’t be the pretext to disbelieve. Believe it, kids. Abbie, like Gary, dedicated his life to telling the truth. That is the common factor in every fallen comrade I have known who made that final choice: to be a truth-seeker and truth-teller and to love intensely among a society of liars and deceivers unworthy of our love.
(...)
Of the two journalists I know who are standing at the ledge today, contemplating the leap into the abyss, they still have their homes (although one is afraid to be alone there, an indication of being close to committing the act). They still have the money to get them to next month’s rent, but the money is running out. And so the hourglass is emptying, the sand is pouring down. They talk each other down off the ledge because nobody else will allow them to speak of the unspeakable act that awaits them, that awaited Gary and so many other truth-tellers.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/12/15/184725/08

This makes a bit more sense than the BFEE force-feeding him barbiturates and scotch, but maybe Abbie's friends were part of the sinister plot (or perhaps Giordano wasn't really his "pal", but was paid by the BFEE to cover up the deaths of Webb and Hoffman). I never met Abbie, but I know some of Andrew's friends, and I haven't found much reason to believe this was a "hit" decades after Abbie was a household name, but perhaps I'm missing the big picture.