Los Angeles:King of pop Michael Jackson, who died in June 2009, used upto 19 fake IDs to buy drugs, reveals a new documentary. The 50-year-old was found unresponsive in his Los Angeles home after suffering cardiac arrest brought on by the anesthetic propofol - a drug reportedly routinely administered by Jackson's physician, Conrad Murray.
The death was ruled a homicide, and Murray took all the blame. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to four years in prison, serving just under two behind bars, reports nypost.com.
But Murray endured the brunt of public hatred even though Jackson, who would have turned 64 on Monday, was abusing drugs throughout much of his life in alarming doses and was allegedly easily enabled to do so by an array of other doctors - ones who never saw a day in jail after the King of Pop's death, according to a new documentary 'TMZ Investigates: Who Really Killed Michael Jackson' due out on Fox next month.
"It's a lot more complicated than just: Dr. Murray was at his bedside when he died," Orlando Martinez, the LAPD detective assigned to Jackson's death, says in the documentary. "Circumstances had been leading up to his death for years, and all of these different medical professionals had allowed Michael to dictate his own terms, get the medicines he wanted, when he wanted them, where he wanted them," Martinez maintains. "All of them are the reason why he's dead today."
Jackson had been taking the propofol in Gatorade-size bottles at the time of his death, according to Ed Winter, the assistant chief coroner for LA County. The medical community, in many ways, facilitated his obsession with the substance, according to Murray, who adds that propofol "was the only way he could go to sleep, especially when he was getting ready for a tour."
"It was not a big deal - he had been using it for decades, different doctors had given it to him from all around the world... and they allowed him to sometimes inject the medicine," Murray, who routinely administered it to Jackson, says. "He was able to push the propofol himself, and the doctors allowed him to do it, and that was OK."
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On top of the makeshift sleep medicine - one that addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky explicitly says is neither a medication that should be used to treat insomnia nor one that is routinely stored outside of medical facilities - Jackson was also hooked on other drugs throughout his career, according to the documentary.
It all began in 1984 when he suffered both second and third-degree burns to his scalp during a pyrotechnic disaster while filming a Pepsi commercial and was given painkillers to recuperate.
In Jackson's own words, drugs had taken over his life in the years that followed. "I became increasingly more dependent on the painkillers to get me through the days of my tour," Jackson says in archived audio, explaining why he cancelled the latter part of his 1993 Dangerous world tour and announced that he was going into treatment. All that time on the road was misery for the star. In archived footage, Jackson confesses: "I don't like it... I go through hell touring."
Things had only gotten worse in the years to follow as Jackson fostered a relationship with famed Hollywood dermatologist Arnold Klein, who died of natural causes at age 70 in 2015. Klein admitted to dishing out the opioid Demerol along with more substances to the superstar.
TMZ Executive Producer Harvey Levin says it was "routine" for MJ to go get high on Demerol "for hours at a time" at Klein's office. "Dr. Klein was more than happy to oblige and he justified with minor procedures," Levin says. "And he did this over and over and over again."
Jackson was taking Demerol at a whopping 300 milligrams at a time, according to Pinsky. The pop singer even mentions the substance in his 1997 track Morphine.