Occam's razor suggests that he said "I ate too many drugs" because that is the logical thing for someone to say if they were panicking that they overdosed
Responding to your other comment here to keep things compact, I also disagree with your statement that the author of the article believes "I ain't do no drugs" is acceptable English. What he claims, apparently as an expert, is that the grammar of this phrase fits a standard pattern in the particular dialect known as African American English (AAE). Given the relatively flawless academic English of the article, I'm almost certain the author distinguishes what is standard in AAE from what is acceptable in (unmodified) English.
That said, your personal experience of hearing the phrase "I ate too many drugs" is a very useful datapoint, and does undercut this part of the authors argument.
When you're used to the police, you behave a certain way around them, but it's not fear of authority. There's wariness, but you know what the police, at least the ones you know, are there for and what they do. It's not just blind fear and animosity.
Wealthy people are worried about their credit and what probation would mean for their reputations and careers and would do anything to avoid engaging with the court and criminal justice systems. When you have no expectation of generational wealth, when engagement with the system is the norm and none of this is new to you, your family, or anyone you know, you don't worry about maintaining plausible deniability or not giving police evidence. You're in, your out, that's life.
I don't think anyone who doesn't already understand what that's like would be able to model how someone could possibly do something that wasn't in their best interest like tell a police officer they're about to OD.
It’s entirely plausible someone would deny doing something illegal while being placed under arrest.
If you know Black men routinely kill police officers, any reasonable person would be afraid of them.
Also, seems that over half of police deaths are accidents: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
So maybe try to back up your racism in facts next time?
(And of course it goes without saying that even if he did lie, it doesn't justify being murdered).
Ignoring toxicology is an abuse of medicine.
That may be true, it's not for me to decide. Feel free to ping me when the authors are struck off for this abuse. Until then I'll assume that their autopsy is valid. Anyway, you're just confusing matters if you keep saying "the autopsy" without referencing the one you mean. I'm not even asking you to acknowledge the other one explicitly if you don't like it.
Also, you're splitting hairs about the exact way that George Floyd was killed by the police. Both autopsies ruled homicide. The only people interacting with him were police officers. According to both autopsies, the police therefore killed George Floyd. We do agree on this, right?
And re: the autopsy listing as homicide https://forensicresources.org/2019/homicide-manner-of-death-...
Thank you for this source. So the police killed George Floyd possibly without "criminal intent", but certainly through "one or more intentional, volitional, potentially harmful acts directed at the decedent", "committed by another person to cause fear, harm, or death". Sounds like a fair description of a baseline of what happened. Intent will have to be determined by the court.