Michael Jackson Couldn’t Sleep Even After He ‘Downed’ 2 Bottles of Cough Syrup
Michael Jackson increasingly dealt with insomnia in the later years of his life. According to his bodyguard, Jackson began relying on medication to fall asleep. He alleged that Jackson needed far over the recommended dose of cough syrup in order to fall asleep. Eventually, this wasn’t enough for him either.
Michael Jackson’s bodyguard said he drank cough syrup to sleep
Jackson’s former bodyguard, Mark Fiddes, recalled a time he was in London with the pop star. Jackson sent Fiddes out to pick up two bottles of Nytol cough syrup. The pharmacy wouldn’t let him purchase two bottles, so he got one and purchased another at a different pharmacy.
“I get to his hotel room, and it horrified me cuz he downed them,” Fiddes said on The Art of Dialogue. “He like, downed them. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then he got another one. Downed it. I was like, ‘Whoa, I think you should just take two, five (milliliter) teaspoons of that, Mike. He said, ‘No, I have to have it. I won’t sleep. I got this important meeting in the morning. I got people flying in.’”
Even though he had far more than the recommended dose, Fiddes said Jackson still couldn’t fall asleep.
“And it didn’t work,” he said. “He drank two bottles of it. And he was still wide awake two hours later. He stayed up all night.”
The next morning, Jackson went to his meeting in pajamas.
Fiddes said that this behavior concerned him
Fiddes said that he started to worry about Jackson’s well-being at this point. He reached out to the people close to Jackson, but claimed that nobody was willing to do anything to help him.
“I got concerned at that point,” he said. “That’s the first time I called the friends around him: ‘Listen, I saw Michael last night, and he drank two bottles of Nytol in front of me. That’s not right, surely.’ But no one was willing to say anything, because the doctor was there, and when the doctor flew in, he prescribed a higher level of medication.”
Michael Jackson died of a Propofol overdose
As Jackson prepared for his This Is It tour, he struggled with insomnia. His personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, began giving him Propofol.
In the two months before his death, Murray had treated him with Propofol every night to help him sleep, per People. Murray reportedly tried to wean him off the drug several days before his death, but Valium, Lorazepam, and Midazolam didn’t put him to sleep on June 25, 2009. Eventually, Murray gave Jackson roughly half his typical dose of Propofol. Jackson died of acute Propofol intoxication, which caused him to go into cardiac arrest shortly after the drug made him fall asleep.
Jackson’s death was ruled a homicide. On Nov. 7, 2010, a jury found Murray guilty of involuntary manslaughter. He received a four-year sentence, though he was released after two years.
