In the documentary Death by Misadventure one of the doctors who tended Bruce after the May 10 collapse discusses the points I have mentioned. The specialist who flew in from London thought that cannabis was an extremely unlikely candidate for killing Bruce Lee - no-one has ever died of it, or been allergic to it. Well, no-one has ever died of Equagesic either - except Bruce Lee it seems. The Hong Kong doctor thinks that cannabis may be a more likely - if unlikely! - candidate than Equagesic. Though of course the argument that no-one has ever been allergic before isn't much of an argument at all.

What are Tom Bleecker's motives? Only he knows. His book should sell well. The blurb on the back cover seems very much like those on any number of scandal-mongering tomes - though blurbs and covers are generally out of the authors' hands. Who is he? He was married to Lee's widow for about 2 years. He met Bruce in 1962, and trained with him - he calls him a friend. He co-authored The Bruce Lee Story with Linda Lee Cadwell in 1988. He says that she gave him access to all Bruce's papers, and that he found evidence for the theories in this book in them. He says he wants to put the facts right about Bruce, owing it to him as a friend and someone who demanded truth. We only have his word as to this.

I don't know anything about drugs and their effects, or about Bruce Lee for that matter, other than what I have read. Making up my mind on theories about Bruce Lee's life and death, and about the motives of those either expounding them or exposing them as fabrications, is not easy. I lack the absolute knowledge I need to do that. I don't know Tom Bleecker - he did not really surface as someone playing a role in Bruce's life in the Bruce Lee literature I read, and I don't know Linda Lee Cadwell, other than admiring her for the way she handled the loss of her husband and her son Brandon, and thinking to myself that Bruce must have been a difficult man to be married to.

Yet, in his book, Bleecker addresses those questions which nag one most, and challenges much of the accepted account of Bruce's life and death - which should be a legitimate exercise if unclouded by personal motives. Many of us share the wish to get to the bottom of the man Bruce Lee, and there is a very definite "official" view of him. Unauthorised biographies may contain more truth than authorised ones, after all, being unhampered by any "party line".

Bleecker makes a case for Bruce abusing and being addicted to cortisone and anabolic steroids, the last in conjunction with diuretics. Together, these drugs can account for weight loss, dehydration, paranoia and rages, all of which are symptoms of Bruce's physical and psychological decline towards the end of his life. That such a decline, whether it was going to be permanent or temporary, was taking place seems to me to be indisputable. One should not lose sight of the stress he was under, the pressure of making Enter the Dragon, which represented the realisation of his dreams to return to Hollywood in triumph. But it was established that his collapse on May 10 could not have been the result of overwork. Bleecker shows how it and that of July 20 may be explained by steroid and cortisone abuse. It is his contention that the medical examinations Bruce went through might have missed this abuse since the effects of cortisone were not as well understood as now, and Bruce would have righted the chemical imbalance caused by the drugs and discontinuing them by taking them up again after the collapse. This also presupposes Bruce's keeping his use of them to himself. (In addition, Bleecker points out that Bruce's cryptorchidism, which is a condition caused by a testosterone deficiency in the male foetus, may have impacted on his physical development - which it may have retarded, as well as his personality. This would mean that Bruce would not be genetically predisposed to an imposing physique for one thing. I don't know how valid a point this is.)

What these drugs do to one's body is quite horrifying, and so are the results of discontinuing use once the body has come to depend on it. Anabolic steroids suppress the body's natural production of certain hormones so that it becomes completely dependent on the steroids for them. Linda Lee Cadwell says in The Bruce Lee Story that Bruce always had a problem with weight loss. If he were abusing anabolic steroids trying to kick the habit would have resulted in severe muscle atrophy. This would have been an enormous problem since Bruce was frankly obsessive about his physique, and to a large extent depended on his physical prowess. One of the considerations in the cavern fight in Enter the Dragon was how to get Bruce's shirt off as quickly as possible. According to many people who encountered Bruce he was often showing off his build, and letting people feel his muscles.