Excerpted from The Guardian (highlighting is mine):


Forensic toxicology reports will be conducted as part of the autopsy in the hope that they will provide a scientific explanation for the actor's death at the age of 46… Hoffman was found with a needle in his arm…

According to reports, the extent of Hoffman's addiction was worse than had previously been publicly known. CNN said that up to 50 small glassine paper bags with a heroin-like substance have been found by investigators, as well as 20 or so used syringes in a plastic cup.

In 2006, Hoffman told 60 Minutes on CBS that he had had to confront alcohol and drug addiction when he was 22 years old. He had consumed "anything I could get my hands on, yeah, I liked it all". Asked by Steve Kroft why he had gone sober then, the actor replied: "You get panicked. I was 22 and I got panicked for my life, it really was just that."...

[By] last May...Hoffman had fallen into addiction again and had been in an east coast rehab center for 10 days. Hoffman had recently been living apart from his longtime partner Mimi O'Donnell, and their three elementary-school aged children . . . who remained in the family's apartment in nearby Jane Street…

Alongside what appeared to be heroin, prescription medicines including anti-anxiety pills were also found in Hoffman's apartment. Authorities across the US have expressed concern in recent months about an epidemic of painkiller addiction linked to a resurgence in sales and consumption of heroin.

While prescription medicines are luring thousands of Americans into addiction, many are then moving on to heroin as a result of increasingly tight restrictions around painkillers such as oxycontin. Heroin is dangerous by dint of the impurities with which it is cut on the black market, and because its potency can be wildly fluctuating, making it easy to overdose.

Just two days before Hoffman died, the medical examiner's office in Nassau County in Long Island warned of a recent spate of deaths involving what appeared to be heroin but in fact turned out to be the powerful narcotic painkiller fentanyl mixed with the fever reducer metamizole which is banned in the US.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/03/philip-seymour-hoffman-cause-death-autopsy