Prince prescribed powerful drugs under a friend’s name
PRINCE was prescribed pain medication oxycodone under the name of a friend in order to protect his privacy, a court document has revealed.
The 57- year- old pop superstar was found dead on April 21 last year at his home in Minnesota, US.
Tests showed he was killed by an accidental overdose of fentanyl – a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more powerful than heroin.
According to search warrants unsealed yesterday, authorities searched Prince’s Paisley Park home in Minneapolis.
They also looked at telephone records of his associates, and the singer’s emails in order to try to determine where he got the fentanyl that killed him.
A search of Prince’s home yielded numer- ous pills in various containers. Some were in prescription bottles for Kirk Johnson, Prince’s long-time friend.
Some pills in other bottles were marked as if they were a mix of acetaminophen and hydrocodone – but at least one of those tested positive for fentanyl, meaning the pill was counterfeit and could only be obtained illegally.
The documents suggest that Prince had been struggling with a addiction to prescription opioids.
One affidavit says Dr Michael Todd Schulenberg admitted prescribing oxycodone pills for Prince in Mr Johnson’s name ‘for Prince’s privacy’. Dr Schulenberg has yet to comment on the documents, which revealed nothing about how the musician got the fentanyl that actually killed him.
Just six days before he died, Prince fell ill on a plane and made an emergency stop in Illinois as he was returning home from a concert in Atlanta. Medics managed to revive him with two doses of a drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose.
Investigators have not interviewed either Mr Johnson or Dr Schulenberg since the hours after Prince died, an official with knowledge of the investigation said.
Prince did not have a mobile phone and authorities searched multiple email accounts that belonged to him as they tried to work out who he was communicating with and where he got the drugs that killed him. However, the unsealed documents do not reveal the outcome of the email searches.