Derek Boogaard, 28

Hockey player Derek Boogaard, 28, of the New York Rangers died in Minneaplis from an accidental overdose of the drug oxycodone mixed with alcohol, the New York Times reported. The medical examiner attributed the cause of death to “mixed alcohol and oxycodone toxicity” and said the death was an accident.

His family acknowledged that he was battling addiction at the time of his death and had played in pain for years, the Times reported. Oxycodone is a powerful and addictive painkiller. In a time-release form, the drug is known as OxyContin. Mixing any form of oxycodone with alcohol can increase the danger of a bad reaction. Boogaard was in a substance abuse rehabilitation program.

The Boston University School of Medicine said that Boogaard’s brain would be examined for signs of a degenerative disease often found in athletes who sustain head trauma. While there is no evidence that this was the case with Boogaard, it was with a former N.H.L. player, Bob Probert, who died of heart failure at 45 last year. Probert had a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and his brain, donated after his death, showed signs of damage from repeated concussions, researchers at Boston University said.

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Gil Scott-Heron, 62

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and recording artist whose syncopated spoken style and mordant critiques of politics, racism and mass media made him a notable voice of black protest culture in the 1970s and an important early influence on hip-hop, died in Manhattan, The New York Times reported.

Along with the work of the Last Poets, a group of black nationalist performance poets who emerged alongside him in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Scott-Heron established much of the attitude and the stylistic vocabulary that would characterize the socially conscious work of early rap groups like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, the Times reported. And he has remained part of the DNA of hip-hop by being sampled by stars like Kanye West.

In later years, he struggled publicly with addiction. Since 2001, Mr. Scott-Heron had been convicted twice for cocaine possession, and he served a sentence at Rikers Island in New York for parole violation.

His friends were horrified by his descent, The Times reported. In interviews Mr. Scott-Heron often dodged questions about drugs, but the writer of the New Yorker profile reported witnessing Mr. Scott-Heron’s crack smoking and being so troubled by his own ravaged physical appearance that he avoided mirrors. “Ten to 15 minutes of this, I don’t have pain,” Mr. Scott-Heron said in the article, as he lighted a glass crack pipe.

That image, The Times report said, seemed to contrast tragically with Mr. Scott-Heron’s legacy as someone who had once so trenchantly mocked the psychology of addiction. “You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it quit it!” he said in his 1971 song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” “God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?”

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Jeff Conaway, 60

Although the actor Jeff Conaway, who died in May at the age of 60, often spoke of his longtime battle with drug and alcohol addiction, he “was a terribly complex case with chronic pain, opiate addiction and severe childhood trauma,” Dr. Drew Pinsky, who had worked with the actor over the past few years, told People Magazine.

“One of the deeply moving aspects of Jeff’s case was the profound trauma he suffered during childhood,” Pinsky said.

“Only in retrospect did he become aware that he was exploited as part of a child pornography ring and suffered ritualistic abuse by the older children in his neighborhood,” Pinsky told the magazine. “As with many severe trauma survivors, chronic pain is a frequent manifestation.”

Recently, “in the setting of addiction, chronic pain often amplifies when opiates or opioids are used,” Pinsky explained. “That is called hyperalgesia, and it has been well documented and I certainly see it frequently in addicts. It is not as though this always occurs, but for addicts there is a very high likelihood. Certainly this was the case with Jeff.”

Pinsky urged Conaway to seek alternatives. “I begged him repeatedly to try something else,” he says. “I told him dozens of times that should he continue down that path, I was convinced he would die. In spite of telling him repeatedly his addiction would kill him, I could not pull him from the clutches of the pain meds.”