Jackson ‘took drug propofol in 1999’

Published on Sunday 13 November 2011 00:09

A PERSONAL assistant turned manager to Michael Jackson said the King of Pop had been taking propofol as early as 1999, and that the singer was drugged up ahead of his 2001 30th anniversary concerts.

Frank Cascio, who became a family friend to Jackson at age five and eventually one of the singer’s closest friends and employees, writes in a new book that he first noticed Jackson taking the drug Demerol while he was accompanying the singer on his Dangerous tour in 1993.

The pop star’s doctor, Conrad Murray, was convicted last week of involuntary manslaughter for supplying the insomnia-plagued Jackson with the powerful operating-room anaesthetic propofol to help him sleep as he rehearsed for his big comeback.

But Cascio writes in My Friend Michael: An Ordinary Friendship With An Extraordinary Man that Jackson started the first of two anniversary shows in 2001 an hour late as a result of being drugged up in his dressing room.

“My naive belief that Michael wouldn’t let his medicine interfere with the show blew up in my face,” Cascio writes. “I can’t begin to describe my disappointment and panic at this moment.”

Cascio became a friend of Jackson’s after his father introduced him to the singer. Cascio’s father worked at the Helmsley Palace in Manhattan, managing the hotel’s towers and suites, where Jackson stayed.

Following that, a five-year-old Cascio and his younger brother Eddie spent time with Jackson at his Neverland Ranch.

He says Jackson was first introduced to Demerol in 1984 when he burned his head during a Pepsi commercial shoot, and Cascio claims he first noticed Jackson using the medicine on his Dangerous tour.

“Now, on tour, and again in deep physical pain, Michael turned back to those drugs,” he wrote.

Cascio says Jackson also took propofol in 1999 after an accident onstage in Munich, and had also taken Demerol to treat the skin disease vitiligo.

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