Almost two months after his death, Michael Jackson’s case has been ruled a homicide, which means Jackson’s physician, Conrad Murray, who supplied him, seemingly, with enough drugs to sedate a herd of stampeding elephants (just a guess, unsourced), is in deep trouble.
The ruling was based on a toxicology assessment that Jackson had an anesthetic called propofol, combined with two other sedatives, in his system when he died. The reason this is so alarming is that propofol is generally exclusively used in the operating room for inducing patients into general anesthesia, and is extremely dangerous when taken out of the range of the appropriate rescue equipment in the event something goes wrong.
Murray had allegedly been supplying Jackson with the drug for some time in order to fight his insomnia, and the dose he gave him on the night of his death, 25mg, is not considered to be dangerously high. However, director of the San Diego division of the California Poison Control System, Lee Cantrell, said that the combination with the other two sedatives “may have been the trigger that pushed him over the edge,” adding, “This is horrible polypharmacy,” he said, referring to the interaction among the various drugs. “No one will treat an insomniac like this.”
The other monkey wrench is that Murray didn’t tell paramedics or doctors at the UCLA hospital about the propofol the day Jackson died. It was only during a subsequent interview that he did. Documents show that Murray had acquired the propofol legally, though he definitely administered it irresponsibly.
Murder, we’re not sure. But there’s definitely some carelessness involved here. To think that a human body was designed to withstand so much drugs over an extended period of time is self-deluding.
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