Even before the King of Pop’s death, the powerful anesthetic that authorities found in his home was a growing concern for federal regulators.
The drug, which is known by the brand name Diprivan or by the generic name Propofol, is one of the most widely used general anesthetics in the United States. It is used to put patients to sleep or make them semiconscious during uncomfortable procedures, such as colonoscopies. The drug is so dangerous that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says only those trained in general anesthesia should administer it.
Paul Wischmeyer, an anesthesiologist at the University of Colorado said,
Me administering this to you at home, I’m fairly likely to hurt you. You’d need to have a surgery center at your house.”
There have been a small but growing number of other abuse cases of Diprivan, nearly all of them involving doctors or other medical personnel. According to physicians who have studied Diprivan abuse, because one dose only lasts for just a few minutes, it’s not uncommon for users to inject themselves 80 times a day for the brief high or the sensation of slipping into unconsciousness.
Dr. Ethan Bryson, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, had this to say,
We’re used to administering what’s usually a lethal dose if we weren’t sitting there. But when you’re doing it to yourself and injecting it in the arm, you can make yourself stop breathing, and if there’s no one there to breathe for you, you’ll die.”
If Michael Jackson was using Diprivan he would have been one of the rare cases of non-medical personnel abusing it that experts know of. In two known cases, the abusers died.
Lisa Thiemann, senior director of professional practice for the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists says that at many hospitals, Diprivan is given the same casual treatment as Tylenol. Three days before Jackson died, Thiemann’s group recommended that the drug be placed in a secure environment.
In 2007, a survey by Wischmeyer found that 71 percent of anesthesiology departments he polled had no system to monitor Diprivan, as is done with other narcotics such as morphine. His study found that the anesthesiology programs where doctors died from Diprivan abuse did not keep track of the drug.
The FDA and the Drug Enforcement Administration were considering making the drug a controlled substance before Jackson died. Now that push is getting renewed attention.
Sources told the Los Angeles Times that detectives found a large quantity of Diprivan in Jackson’s home. The maker of the drug, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, said they were contacted by the DEA about a lot number stamped on the drug’s packaging. The identification could help trace how the drug was obtained.
Jackson’s dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein, told CNN’s Larry King that Jackson was using the drug with an anesthesiologist “to go to sleep at night” while on tour in Germany. The last time Jackson toured that country was 1997.
Dr. Omar Manejwala, associate medical director at the William J. Farley Center in Williamsburg Place in Virginia, an addiction treatment center that specializes in physicians, said that almost all Diprivan abusers began using the drug in order to overcome insomnia, even though it only knocks them out for a few minutes.
They describe a transient feeling of pleasure and a relief from the experience of sleep deprivation.”
Doctors say that going under with Diprivan is not the same as sleeping. Wischmeyer said,
“You never use propofol for insomnia treatment.”
Noting that Diprivan is not a drug that can be found on the street, Dr. Zeev Kain, chairman of the anesthesiology department at University of California, Irvine Medical Center said,
“If indeed he [Jackson] did use it, there is no way he did it by himself.”
Source: MJFC / chicagotribune.com
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