Chopra: Michael Jackson Could Have Been Saved

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AP Photo Michael Jackson’s famed health guru, Deepak Chopra, tells The Daily Beast’s Gerald Posner about his grief, his own medical dealings with the singer—and how a simple emergency-room drug could have saved his life.

“I will not be doing any more interviews,” Deepak Chopra, the famed mind, body, wellness guru and 21-year friend of Michael Jackson, told me. “No more TV, no more print. If someone calls, I can tell them I spoke to you in depth. I just want to mourn now for my lost friend.”

Chopra will talk to the media at some point, of course, but right now he says he is emotionally and physically exhausted. In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Beast, Chopra, a board-certified internist and endocrinologist who also formerly worked as an emergency-room doctor in Massachusetts, made several points to try to clarify the circumstances surrounding the pop star’s death. Among them:

• Based on his understanding of Jackson’s final hours, a common and well-known overdose antagonist, naloxone (narcan), could have saved him.

• When Chopra learned that Dr. Conrad Murray had been Jackson’s full-time concert physician and had stayed overnight, he wondered why the star wasn’t still alive.

• Chopra made his own efforts to force an intervention a year ago over Jackson's drug use, with the Jackson family's knowledge and approval.

• Stars get these drugs using fake names, multiple prescriptions, and complicit pharmacists.

Chopra's friendship with Michael Jackson brought him to the fore immediately after the pop star’s death, and he made known to Larry King his strong feeling that Jackson’s prescription addiction had been fed by unscrupulous doctors. The news last night that the Los Angeles Police Department had asked the Drug Enforcement Administration to officially enter the investigation must have sent a chill through dozens of Hollywood doctors who feed the drug habits of star clients. And for those who were Michael Jackson’s legal pushers, the DEA's move is indeed bad news.

“With a weak pulse, the first thing I would have given him was narcan. Its effect would have been dramatic and Michael might be alive today.”

Courtesy of Dilip Mehtra/Contact Press Image “But it is long overdue that someone does something about this,” Chopra said. “It’s an epidemic. Far more people die every year from prescription medicine than from illegal drugs. It is the No. 1 cause of addiction.”

Chopra, who has built an international wellness and self-help empire, says that only 1 percent of his clients are celebrities. But the public often thinks of him as a New Age wizard to the stars. And with his main Chopra Center based in Southern California, he spends a lot of time there.

He had come to have his hunches about some of the doctors who abuse their prescribing rights, but won’t name them on the record. “Not all of them are these so-called concierge doctors. Not at all,” he told me. “Many have regular practices. It is well-known that a very high percentage, maybe half, of all enabling doctors have their own prescription or alcohol problems. They have developed co-dependent relationships with their patients, and their drug-pushing has become part of their identity. By continuing to enable a famous person, as a doctor you have control over them. The star is dependent on them.”

Many people forget that the 62-year-old Chopra is a medical doctor, one heavily involved in continuing research. He cited a series of clinical studies that establish that, for some people, the heavy use of opiates causes hyperalgesia, a condition in which the drugs damage the peripheral nerves and actually increase the level of pain.

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