Doctors and the pill-pop stars

A FORMER Hollywood doctor-to-the-stars has broken four decades of silence to reveal how celebrities’ demands for drugs make caring for them professionally “a near impossibility”. Now retired and in his 80s, Dr James (not his real name) treated four rock and pop icons, including late Doors frontman Jim Morrison, in the late Sixties and early Seventies. As the case against Michael Jackson’s personal physician Conrad Murray unfolded on TV he was “unsurprised” to learn detectives found 27 prescription medicines in the singer’s bedroom apart from the Propofol that ultimately killed him. Dr Murray’s defence team accused Jackson’s dermatologist and longtime friend Arnold Klein, of addicting the singer to the painkiller Demerol. Dr Klein has not been charged with any crime nor is he a ­witness for either side in Murray’s trial for involuntary manslaughter and he remains a respected ­medical professional. Yet so ­vitriolic did these attacks against him become last week at Los Angeles Superior Court that Klein’s ­attorney Garo Ghazarian appeared on TV to declare: “I’m not going to take a swing back at them but this is what we call a classic SODDI defence, meaning Some Other Dude Did It. In this case that is laughable.”Dr James said: “I know of many doctors who have, for want of a better phrase, succumbed to the celebrity swag bag and earned a fortune ­dispensing whatever their famous patients want whenever they want it. “These days those physicians are known as ‘Concierge ­Doctors’ and their big-name patients are referred to and treated as clients rather than patients. The fact is this practice has been going on for a long, long time.” Dr James draws an immediate parallel with Elvis Presley who died from a drug overdose nearly 32 years before Jackson. Presley had suffered multiple addictions to multiple drugs, most of them prescribed by his personal physician Dr George Nichopoulos. Dr James said: “I treated [Jim] ­Morrison briefly, as he was just hitting worldwide fame and had a reputation for swallowing anything that might make him high. He had a severe chest and throat infection on the eve of a tour and was referred to me. “It was patently obvious he had much deeper problems, so I was not surprised when, after we’d beaten his infection with regular antibiotics, he asked if I would be willing to ­prescribe something, as he put it, ‘to take the edge off’. “I knew what he meant and he followed up that request by suggesting that, if I could free myself from my practice for three or four months, money would be no object if I were to join his tour. “I had had similar requests, couched with equal ambiguity, from at least two other household-name artists. “I said no every time, very bluntly, leaving none of them in any doubt that I did not swear my Hippocratic oath simply to become a travelling one-man ­dispensary catering to the whims and cravings of a rock star or a movie star. “I could have become an extraordinarily rich man if I had been prepared to abandon my principles but at what ultimate cost? I can think of one fellow professional who must be asking that very question today.”