RX STuNNER
Prince got drugs via fraud just before OD
HIS NAME wasn’t Prince — but he got the singer’s drugs anyway, authorities say.
A doctor seeing the Minnesota superstar days before his death last year wrote the music legend oxycodone prescriptions under the name of his bodyguard, according to court documents unsealed Monday.
Search warrants and affidavits spanning several months show authorities were attempting to track down where Prince obtained the fentanyl that led to his accidental overdose in his Paisley Park complex last April 21.
One affidavit reveals that Dr. Michael Schulenberg — who worked with Prince in the pop icon’s final days and was at Paisley Park the day of his death — wrote Prince an oxycodone prescription a week before the deadly overdose.
Schulenberg told authorities he penned the prescription after Prince overdosed on a flight to Minnesota and had to be revived with a drug reversing the effects of opioids. The doctor acknowledged he put the prescription under the name of bodyguard Kirk Johnson “for Prince’s privacy,” according to the affidavit.
The document also says Prince, 57, did not have a regular doctor, and his managers set him up with physicians who gave him B12 vitamin injections to help him “feel better” before shows.
The investigation has yet to trace the source of the fentanyl and has not led to any charges.
Prince remained an enigmatic figure even in the global spotlight, and his addiction and death reportedly came as a shock to even those who knew him well.
The court papers detail his obsessive quest for secrecy, especially about his drug habit.
Investigators found pain medications scattered throughout the Paisley Park compound near Minneapolis, according to the documents. The drugs were often stored in containers for overthe-counter vitamins, rather than in prescription pill vials.
Detectives also found one suitcase with the name tag “Peter Bravestrong,” an alias Prince used for travel. It contained one bottle labeled for the anti-nausea drug ondansetron that actually contained oxycodone, an affidavit says. Schulenberg prescribed the medicine under Johnson’s name on April 7, 2016.
Johnson told investigators he had no idea Prince had a pain pill habit, despite working with him since the 1980s and having full access to Paisley Park.
The day before Prince’s death, Johnson went to a Walgreens pharmacy to pick up Prince’s prescriptions. The bodyguard told investigators it was the first time he had ever done that.
TMZ reported last year that the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration opened a criminal probe into Schulenberg, a Minnesota family doctor, as well as Howard Kornfeld, a California addiction doctor. Neither has been indicted or charged.
The day before Prince’s death, his team reached out to Kornfeld to stage an intervention. Kornfeld rushed his son to bring buprenorphine, an opioid addiction treatment, to Paisley Park, with the approval of an unidentified doctor.
It remains unclear if that approval came from Schulenberg, but he is not on the federal list of doctors licensed to prescribe buprenorphine.