The King and Dr. Nick: What Really Happened to Elvis and Me by George Nichopoulos & Rose Clayton Phillips

Author:George Nichopoulos & Rose Clayton Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2018-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

FUELED WITHTHAT information, I obtained a copy of the Bio-Science Laboratory report and began my own search in earnest. The term polypharmacy intrigued me as a cause of death. Polypharmacy simply means “more than one chemical.” I had been practicing polypharmacy for years; so had every doctor who prescribed more than one medication at a time to one person.

I had only read newspaper comments regarding Baptist Hospital’s autopsy analysis, but it appeared to me that they had omitted a number of important factors from their equation when attempting to determine if Elvis’s death was drug-related. I believed the hospital’s ruling had been premature, just as Dr. Francisco’s provisional ruling had been. Baptist’s evidence was too clinically based to suit me. I felt a forensic-based analysis could yield different results. Sure, there were a lot of drugs in Elvis’s system, but were the levels deadly? No. Was there proof that in combination they had caused death? No.

Considering Elvis’s actions on the night he died, that he had conducted business meetings, played racquetball, and then read while attempting to go to sleep, overdose just did not seem possible. Still, if there was even a possibility that drugs killed Elvis, I, more than anyone else, wanted to know. There was a lot to consider:

• The idea that downers, even in high numbers, could have killed Elvis was laughable to me. Elvis was not even asleep when the sudden event struck that caused his death. How could the sedatives have killed him if they could not even put him to sleep?

• For the most part, except for the codeine, the medications in his body were ones he had been taking over a period of time—nothing exceptional. He had been taking the same medications every day and walking around—alive—so that combination at those specific levels did not just happen to kill him on that particular day.

• The Demerol (meperidine) was only found by one laboratory, so it was undoubtedly a very small trace. I did not prescribe that Demerol to Elvis; he had been addicted to Demerol and detoxed from it. Contraband Demerol was found when he was hospitalized on April 1, 1977, and I still suspected it had led to his drug reaction in Palm Springs shortly after that. The Demerol could not have been influential in Elvis’s death; it had been in his body for too long.

• Elvis had not taken the Dilaudid I had prescribed for him the night he died. There had already been questions raised about the role of that drug in his death. The answer is simple: either Elvis never got the Dilaudid or he decided not to take it. Dilaudid was not in his blood, so it did not kill him. Some people claimed the Dilaudid was probably in his stomach contents that were not analyzed. That would not have mattered. If a substance is found only in the stomach, it cannot be the cause of death; it can only be a clue to the manner of death.

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