Chopra didn’t check the message until the next day, and when he called back, the number left was not working. “I didn’t think anything was unusual,” he said. “Michael frequently changed his numbers.”

And then a day later, Chopra learned from a friend that Michael was dead. It was numbing news.

“I cared for him deeply. I understood that in the context of his life that all his behaviors that seemed so odd to so many, were absolutely understandable. He often said to me, ‘No one understands me. No one.’”

When Chopra learned that Dr. Conrad Murray had been Jackson’s full-time concert physician and had stayed overnight, he wondered why the star wasn’t still alive. I told him that Dr. Murray said he had checked on Jackson several times during the night. Chopra lit up: “That means that the doctor knew he had a patient with a serious drug problem. The only reason to check on someone overnight is to make sure they have not taken too many drugs and they stop breathing.”

If Murray knew Jackson had a drug problem—“which it is hard to imagine that any doctor would not quickly realize with Michael at this time”—then Chopra is bewildered by the failure of Murray to have naxolene, a well-known narcotic antagonist used to revive patients with drug overdoses. “I used to work as a doctor in an emergency room, and there were many times when I saw someone brought in who had overdosed, and by injecting naxolene, the results were often remarkable.”

That Murray says Jackson was still warm, and had a weak pulse, is further evidence to Chopra that naxolene might have saved him. “With a weak pulse, the first thing I would have given him was narcan [the drug’s trade name]. Its effect would have been dramatic and Michael might be alive today. No one has been able to answer why he had so many drugs in his house, but the attending physician did not have naxolene in case of an overdose. I don’t understand it.”

But Chopra doesn’t blame Murray. It’s the prescribing doctors at whom his anger is directed. “We put drug pushers in jail but give licenses to doctors to do the same thing. It is impossible to go after them legally in most cases, and that makes them totally indiscriminate. I know personally that they write multiple prescriptions and they even use false names. And they know which pharmacists won’t check identifications, or will allow someone else to pick up the prescription. It’s impossible to track the prescriptions to see that they were given for one patient. This cult of drug-pushing doctors, with their co-dependent relationships with addicted celebrities, must be stopped. Let’s hope that Michael’s unnecessary death is the call for action.”

Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism (http://www.posner.com). Posner lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.