California Attorney General Jerry Brown has joined forces with investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency looking into the growing possibility that Michael Jackson may have died from a drug overdose illegally prescribed by his medical team.
“We are assisting in any way we can,” Scott Gerber, the director of communications for Brown, told TheWrap. “We are assisting in the investigation.”
The California Department of Justice would use a high-tech computer-monitoring system to determine who had been “prescribing medications to Jackson, how much the doses were and for how long and to whom,” Gerber said.
The system, called the Controlled Substance Utilization and Evaluation System, helped investigators in the death of former Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith.
It provides reports on controlled-substance activity by looking at the prescription rate of medications for certain patients through prescription documents filed with the state of California, as required by law. It also looks at records at pharmacies and licensed health-care practitioners.
Its purpose is to determine if the use of prescription drugs has been diverted for recreational purposes.
An LAPD spokesman declined to comment to TheWrap on an AP story saying that the anaesthetic Dipran had been found among medications at Jackson’s home.
Brown is not a newcomer to delving into illegal drug activity involving celebrities. His probe into the 2007 death of Anna Nicole Smith netted Howard K. Stern, Smith’s lawyer, and doctors Khristine Eroshevich and Sandeep Kapoor as her enablers after a two-year probe by Brown, state medical and insurance officials and the DEA.
"What we have in this case is a conspiracy among three individuals," Brown told a news conference at the time. "Howard K. Stern is the principal enabler, and Dr. Eroshevich and Dr. Kapoor are prescribing drugs excessively to a known addict and using false and fictitious names, all in violation of the law and all in furtherance of a conspiracy."
