Friend warned Prince about drugs

MINNEAPOLIS: After Prince had to be revived from a drug overdose a week before his death, a friend told the musical superstar that he needed to stop taking painkillers. But Prince said he couldn’t – his hands hurt so much that if he quit, he’d have to stop performing.

“This piano tour, I think, was getting to his hands,” singer Judith Hill had told investigators.

Those words, found amid hundreds of pages of interviews between investigators and Prince’s closest confidants, provide insight into just how much the man known for his energetic performances and larger-than-life personality was suffering. The documents open parts of Prince’s life that the intensely private celebrity tried to keep from even his closest friends.

“How did he hide this so well?” Prince’s closest friend and bodyguard Kirk Johnson had said. While Johnson said he didn’t realise that opioids were a problem until the overdose, he had noticed Prince had been unwell before that and had taken him to a doctor.

Prince was 57 when he was found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park studio compound in suburban Minneapolis on April 21, 2016. An autopsy found he had died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin.

Authorities said it was likely that Prince didn’t know he was taking the dangerous drug, which was laced in counterfeit pills made to look like a generic version of the painkiller Vicodin.

The source of those pills is unknown and no one has been charged in Prince’s death. – AP/ African News Agency/ana