According to a new documentary, music icon Michael Jackson, who passed away in June 2009, used up to 19 fraudulent identifications to purchase narcotics. The 50-year-old was discovered unconscious in his Los Angeles home after going into cardiac arrest as a result of the anaesthetic propofol, which Jackson’s doctor Conrad Murray is said to have prescribed often.
Murray accepted full responsibility for the homicide verdict and the tragedy. Jackson, who would have turned 64 on Monday, was allegedly easily enabled to use drugs throughout much of his life in alarming doses by a variety of other doctors, some of whom never saw a day in jail after the King of Pop’s death, according to a new documentary. Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison, serving just under two years behind bars, but he still faced the brunt of public resentment.
“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 said. “All of them are the reason why he’s dead today.”
Jackson said that throughout the years that followed, narcotics had completely taken over his life. Jackson explains why he cancelled the final leg of his 1993 “Dangerous” world tour and announced that he was entering treatment in an audio recording from the past: “I became increasingly more dependent on the painkillers to get me through the days of my tour”
