The Unlikelihood That Dale Tarapacki Overdosed on Alprazolam

The previous post discusses the problem of how pharmacist Dale Tarapacki, near death from alprazolam poisoning, could have continued to press on in an effort to move his truck which was stuck off a remote road, ultimately causing the wheel bearings of the front passenger’s side to blow out, the fuel pump to spray gasoline on the driver’s side, and the truck then to be fully ignited.  That Tarapacki was not suicidal is discussed in an earlier post (see June 5, 2022).

The following points are relevant to Tarapacki’s alleged excessive ingestion of alprazolam:

(1) According to someone who had known the pharmacist for a long time and was close to him, Tarapacki was not a “pill popper”: he did not misuse prescription drugs.

(2) Tarapacki had told a number of individuals (who informed me) that he felt strongly about protecting and not abusing his pharmacy license.  He thus would not have illegally hoarded alprazolam (Xanax) for his personal use.

(3) As a well trained pharmacist, Tarapacki would have known the risks of taking too much alprazolam.

How, then, did Tarapacki come to suffer the “acute alprazolam intoxication” that the medical examiner determined was the primary cause of his death, as recorded in the police report by the Cattaraugus County Sheriff’s office?

The answer to that question may well lie in Tarapacki’s whereabouts the day of his suspicious truck fire.  In what was apparently a very brief investigation into Tarapacki’s death (see post of June 5, 2022), there seems to have been no real effort to find out where Tarapacki had been in the three hours between 11:45 a.m., when he was seen by a neighbor, and 2:45 p.m., when the police report records that the alarm came in for his truck fire.  According to the police report, a female acquaintance was at Tarapacki’s residence until 4 a.m. that morning, one neighbor saw him carrying a fishing pole from his house about 10 a.m., and two others saw him on his property at 11:45 a.m.  Since the investigators apparently found no one who saw him after that point, a sensible procedure would have been to check Tarapacki’s phone records to find out if someone had called him or if he had called someone to get together, whether for a fishing trip (on which, see posts of May 1, 2022, and April 30, 2018) or another reason.  Yet the police report indicates nothing about phone records.

One of Tarapacki’s close friends insisted that he must have been “roofied.”  Given Tarapacki’s positions on prescription drugs outlined above, it seems most likely that alprazolam was administered to him without his knowledge early the afternoon of his death on April 11, 2005.

Why were Tarapacki’s phone records not examined?  And why did the investigation end so quickly?