There's currently an inquest going on into the death of Anna Nicole Smith's son Daniel Smith – and according to sometime Anna Nicole Smith impregnator Larry Birkhead, Anna Nicole Smith used to give Daniel Ecstasy tablets, believing that it was better that he got into drugs around her than in the company of strangers.

Daniel Smith died a year and a half ago. It was a drug-based death. That's the indisputable logic of Anna Nicole Smith in action, folks.

It's not really a surprise to hear that Daniel Smith had drink and alcohol issues. That's a general side-effect of having Anna Nicole Smith as a mother, we'd imagine – the last thing any teenager wants to see is a DVD of their mother erotically splashing about naked in the bath.

Actually, that's a lie – the last thing any teenager wants to see is their mother sleeping with an almost-dead oil billionaire out of what must have been a ghoulish desire for material riches. But that happened to Daniel Smith too, so it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, Daniel Smith is now dead and although the news pales against Anna Nicole Smith's death five months later, there's still an inquest being held into the circumstances surrounding his death. As we all know, a cocktail of drugs killed Daniel Smith – but to shed more light on the matter the father of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter, Larry Birkhead, has taken to the stand in the Bahamas to explain exactly how depressing things actually got. E! Online reports:

"[Anna Nicole] didn't care for the kids he was hanging out with at the community college he attended," said Birkhead, who added that "there was tension" between mother and son during the period between January and May 2006, when Birkhead lived with Anna Nicole. He lost 20 pounds. He missed curfew. He was hospitalized for abusing sedatives. Daniel was once caught on the home-surveillance camera stealing methadone from his mother's stash, Birkhead testified.

This worried Anna Nicole Smith, Birkhead claims. In fact, Anna Nicole Smith decided to nip Daniel's wayward behaviour in the bud by giving him an Ecstasy tablet herself, so she could control the situation rather than let him run off and experiment with drugs alongside strangers.

As with most things pertaining to Anna Nicole Smith, this was an essentially good-natured move that couldn't have been more wrongheaded if she pinned Daniel Down and injected antelope tranquilliser into his eyeballs. Because, you know, we're no experts but we'd imagine that when you try Ecstasy for the first time you don't want to be trapped in a room with a wailing clown-faced titty-model that you're related to who gives you the heebie-jeebies plenty enough even when you're not off your face on drugs. 

The enquiry into Daniel Smith's death continues, but it's baby Dannielynn Hope that we feel most sorry for. How tragic to grow up without having a spaced-out mother with chronically-fluctuating weight issues for a drug-dealer. She'll be one messed-up kid, that's for sure.

Read more:

Drugs Dominate Anna Nicole Cases – E! Online