According to the New York Post, the 50-year-old 'King of Pop' had been found unresponsive in his Los Angeles home after suffering cardiac arrest brought on by the anaesthetic propofol -- a drug reportedly routinely administered by Jackson's physician, Conrad Murray.
Jackson's death was ruled a homicide, and Murray got convicted of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to four years in prison, serving just under two behind bars.
A new documentary 'TMZ Investigates: Who Really Killed Michael Jackson' due to be out on Fox next month suggests that though Murray was blamed, Jackson, throughout most of his life had been abusing drugs 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 legend's death.
New York Post reported, Orlando Martinez, the LAPD detective assigned to Jackson's death, said in the documentary, "It's a lot more complicated than just: Dr. Murray was at his bedside when he died."
"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. All of them are the reason why he's dead today," he continued.
According to Ed Winter, the assistant chief coroner for LA County, Jackson had been taking the propofol in 'Gatorade'-size bottles at the time of his death. In many ways, the medical community facilitated his obsession with the substance, as per Murray, who added that propofol "was the only way he could go to sleep, especially when he was getting ready for a tour."
Jackson was also hooked on other drugs throughout his career, reveals the documentary.
TMZ Executive Producer Harvey Levin, to whom famed Hollywood dermatologist Arnold Klein confessed dishing out the opioid Demerol along with more substances to the superstar in a November 2009 interview, said it was "routine" for MJ to go get high on Demerol "for hours at a time" at Klein's office.
It was also revealed that as Jackson and Klein's relationship turned into more of a friendship rather than that of doctor and patient, the dermatologist allegedly kept fraudulent documents on the singer. Winter has stated that Jackson created 19 false aliases to collect different drugs, and Klein had kept a special book noting which prescriptions went to each fake identity.
"The way that Michael went about getting all these drugs was doctor shopping. He had multiple, different doctors that he was involved with and he would go to 'Doctor A' and ask for a sedative, and then he would go to 'Doctor B' and may ask for the same one," Jackson's plastic surgeon, Dr Harry Glassman, claims.
Things reached a boiling point in 2009 when Jackson was readying for his 'This Is It' tour as his behaviour became a noticeable worry for director Kenny Ortega. "There are strong signs of paranoia, anxiety and obsessive-like behaviour. I think the very best thing we can do is get a top psychiatrist in, to evaluate him ASAP," Ortega wrote in an email of concern during rehearsals.
As per the New York Post, Jackson had also been rehearsing for the tour that took so much out of him up to the day before his death on June 25, one more factor in his own demise.
The outlet states Martinez admitted that Murray has unfairly suffered for consequences that were not necessarily his whole doing. He said, "We knew that there were multiple doctors doing what Dr Murray had done and that they had done it over the course of years."
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