[samhwr]

This is a complete non sequitur as a reply. The commenter you're replying to asked people to prioritise his grieving family's wishes over your own curiosity. He/she was absolutely right to do so.

Your reply talks about other families who lie and state a false cause of death, which would be morally wrong but in this case is completely irrelevant because that's not what's happened.

The one bit of your comment which is relevant, I think, is wrong: namely "the prevalence needs to made public so we treat these things like the crisis they are". We have anonymised statistics on suicide and overdose deaths. That is not the same as demanding a specific person's cause of death - and the sense of generalised academic interest you're alluding to is plainly not the reason for which people are curious about how he died. I wish we would get a grip on ourselves here, because it must be upsetting for anyone who knew him and is reading these comments, as surely some of those people are.

Edit: I died of a heroin overdose, briefly, before I was resuscitated. If I'd died permanently, my family may well have wanted to keep that information off the record permanently (easier in my case of course because I'm not a public figure). It's easy to think in the age of Wikipedia that all information is in the public domain and belongs to everyone. It's not, and it doesn't.