Hyvä artikkeli Elvis Presleyn henkilöhistoriasta eri sortin "laillisten" lääkeaineiden väärinkäyttäjänä löytyy tästä osoitteesta:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,772041,00.html
Tässä artikkelin pääsisältö:
To begin with, Dr Nick treated Elvis for insomnia. But by 1967, this was no simple task. Elvis had a history of disrupted sleep, sleepwalking and nightmares going back to childhood. It intensified after the death of his mother, and his drafting into the army in 1957. And in his early twenties, Elvis had also developed an evangelical enthusiasm for amphetamines. Legally available in the US as appetite suppressants - they weren't outlawed until 1965 - they kept him going and they kept his weight down. They also, of course, kept him awake. He had become what Dr Nick calls a 'night person'.
By the time he became Dr Nick's patient, Elvis was a dedicated student of the Physician's Desk Reference , the doctor's encyclopedia of contemporary pharmacology. He was taking an exotic cocktail of uppers and downers: Tiunal, Desbutal, Escatrol. The powerful tranquilliser Placidyl would become a particular favourite. And he was going to increasing lengths to get hold of them - sending 'the guys' off to Vegas on prescription shopping trips.
At first, Dr Nick treated Elvis only on the odd occasions when he came back to Memphis from his house in LA. 'He was still in the movies. I didn't really become his primary doctor until he moved back here. Around '70.'
But in 1969, Elvis began the first of his month-long residencies, giving explosive live performances at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Dr Nick went with him. For Elvis, Vegas - and the national touring that followed - would become a treadmill as financially profitable as it was physically costly. It would carry him on to the end of his life. For Dr Nick, it would lay the groundwork for the end of his career.
Throughout his time with Elvis, Dr Nick continued to work at the Memphis group practice. When Elvis summoned him to Graceland in the middle of the night, often simply because he was lonely and wanted someone to talk to, Dr Nick still went to his surgery in the morning. When Elvis opened in Vegas, Dr Nick flew out for the first couple of days, and then returned to Memphis.
This arrangement did not work well. Elvis's reliance upon a regime of drugs to get him going when he awoke and bring him down at bedtime was intensified by the concert schedule. Now, he needed amphetamines before a show, and then tranquillisers afterwards: and there were two shows every night. When he was around, Dr Nick tried to manage Elvis's intake. But when Dr Nick wasn't around, there was a roll-call of other doctors only too happy to fulfil the King's requirements. Doctors like Elias Ghanem and Thomas 'Flash' Newman - named for his ability to materialise at a moment's notice bearing anything you might desire. And after Priscilla left him in 1971, Elvis's behaviour became increasingly erratic. He spent more and more time in a chemical fog, taking whatever he could get his hands on.
In 1973, he overdosed twice on barbiturates: in February, when he spent three days in a coma in his suite at the Hilton, and later, on tour in St Louis. He began cancelling shows more and more frequently. At the end of the year he was admitted, semi-comatose, to the Baptist Hospital in Memphis. This time, he had been secretly seeing a doctor in LA. He had become poisoned by cortisone injections and was addicted to the high-test opiate painkiller Demerol. Dr Nick put him on meth-adone. Then he began trying to stop the flow of contraband pills from other doctors.
'Elvis's problem,' Dr Nick has said, 'was that he didn't see the wrong in it. He felt that by getting it from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street. He was a person who thought that as far as medications and drugs went, there was something for everything.'
While he was in hospital, Dr Nick and Elvis's road manager, Joe Esposito, raided Elvis's bedroom at Graceland: they found three giant pharmacy-sized jars, each containing 1,000 high-dose Seconal, Dexedrine and Placidyl. There were even vials of pills hidden in the seams of the curtains.
Afterwards, whenever Elvis went to see a dentist or another doctor for any reason, Dr Nick went with him, 'because he would always talk these guys into anything- crazy things'.
When Dr Nick refused to give him what he wanted, he'd just find another doctor. 'He'd get mad at me, and he'd get on his plane and fly to Vegas or Palm Springs or California and stay for a few days and get what he wanted. And I'd have to take it away from him when he got back home.'
This petulant hunger for drugs was such that, when Dr Nick thought Elvis was claiming symptoms he didn't have, he began to administer placebos.
'On the road,' he says, 'he was so afraid that he wouldn't get enough sleep to do a good show the next night that he would end up asking you for an extra pill or two. So those extra pill or twos would be placebos.'
Dr Nick and the guys would while away their spare hours on tour by making counterfeit pills for the King. 'We'd sit around,' he says, 'and, instead of playing cards, we'd make placebos. Ha!' Using syringes, they'd suck the liquid out of capsules and refill them with saline solution. When Elvis asked for a shot that he didn't need, Dr Nick would wait until his back was turned, squirt the liquid on the floor, and then 'inject' his patient with the emptied syringe. Tablets were trickier. Eventually, Dr Nick managed to persuade Knoll, the manufacturers of Dilaudid, Elvis's favourite painkiller, to press a special batch of a thousand pills without any active ingredients. It took a year of letter-writing and legal wrangling. But they looked just like the real thing. They cost him $5.98 apiece.
After a series of embarrassing on-stage disasters and show cancellations when other doctors tried their methods on Elvis, Dr Nick became the regular tour physician. Licensed only to prescribe drugs in Tennessee, he would stock up on 'supplies' before leaving the state. After the first couple of times out, he got to know what he would need in advance. He began each tour with three locked suitcases filled with prescription drugs.
'My job,' he says, 'was taking care of the whole entourage. There were about 150 people I took care of. You had a couple of bands. You had the songbirds. You had the people that set up the stage... And all these people were night people, too.'
Dr Nick made sure the drugs for Elvis were strictly controlled. On tour, Elvis would come to him at regular intervals: on waking; before the show; after the show; and at bedtime. Each time, he would be allowed specific uppers and downers in the lowest doses Dr Nick thought he could get away with. At home, without the excuse that he needed amphetamines to perform, Elvis was given just the manila envelopes of sleeping tablets - 'bedtime packet number one' and 'bedtime packet number two'- to be handed out separately during the night. During the 10 years he treated him, Dr Nick never knew Presley to sleep for longer than three hours at a stretch without waking up, looking for more pills.
Surrounded by watchful retainers; impossible to trust around a medicine cabinet; incapable of making decisions for himself: it's very easy to get the impression that Elvis was a stupid man.
'No, he was a very smart guy,' says Dr Nick. 'Not to have any college education... He was well read. Ha! He carried more books on the road than we carried drugs. I mean, he had three suitcases - three big steamer trunks, full of books. Religious books, metaphysical books, some medical stuff.'
Did he understand what he was doing to himself?
'No, I don't think he did.'
Do you think you were afraid of telling him what he needed to do?
'It's hard to convince somebody what's right and wrong or what they need to do. It's hard when you've got somebody that thinks they have all the answers and no matter what you throw at 'em, they've got answers for you.'
But why didn't he just trust you as a doctor?
'Well, I think he did. I think that's the reason I was around as long as I was.'
But he still ignored you when you said, 'Look, stop taking these pills.' Which presumably you did.
'Yeah. I mean, he was always childlike with these things. I don't think he ever realised how harmful these things could be to him. If he got a sore throat, and I gave him a penicillin tablet - I gave him 20 to take, saying, "You take four a day of these things until you use these up," - so he's going to take eight or 12 a day until he uses them up 'cos he thinks he'll get well faster that way.'
But that's the behaviour of a stupid man.
'I know. It was certainly a stupid decision on his part. But he wasn't a stupid man. He was really a smart guy. But he did a lot of stupid-assed things.'
Elvis Presley died on 16 August, 1977. At the time of his death, he was suffering from glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage and an enlarged colon. All of these ailments were aggravated, if not caused, by drug abuse. 'He didn't have any major heart problems,' says Dr Nick. 'Even with his obesity and everything - that's what really surprised me. I was dumbfounded that he died.'
Muutoin hyvän yleiskuvan Elvis Presleyn urasta saa lukemalla mm. Peter Guralnickin suomennetut teokset "Nuori Elvis: Viimeinen juna Memphisiin" ja "Graceland".
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,772041,00.html
Tässä artikkelin pääsisältö:
To begin with, Dr Nick treated Elvis for insomnia. But by 1967, this was no simple task. Elvis had a history of disrupted sleep, sleepwalking and nightmares going back to childhood. It intensified after the death of his mother, and his drafting into the army in 1957. And in his early twenties, Elvis had also developed an evangelical enthusiasm for amphetamines. Legally available in the US as appetite suppressants - they weren't outlawed until 1965 - they kept him going and they kept his weight down. They also, of course, kept him awake. He had become what Dr Nick calls a 'night person'.
By the time he became Dr Nick's patient, Elvis was a dedicated student of the Physician's Desk Reference , the doctor's encyclopedia of contemporary pharmacology. He was taking an exotic cocktail of uppers and downers: Tiunal, Desbutal, Escatrol. The powerful tranquilliser Placidyl would become a particular favourite. And he was going to increasing lengths to get hold of them - sending 'the guys' off to Vegas on prescription shopping trips.
At first, Dr Nick treated Elvis only on the odd occasions when he came back to Memphis from his house in LA. 'He was still in the movies. I didn't really become his primary doctor until he moved back here. Around '70.'
But in 1969, Elvis began the first of his month-long residencies, giving explosive live performances at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Dr Nick went with him. For Elvis, Vegas - and the national touring that followed - would become a treadmill as financially profitable as it was physically costly. It would carry him on to the end of his life. For Dr Nick, it would lay the groundwork for the end of his career.
Throughout his time with Elvis, Dr Nick continued to work at the Memphis group practice. When Elvis summoned him to Graceland in the middle of the night, often simply because he was lonely and wanted someone to talk to, Dr Nick still went to his surgery in the morning. When Elvis opened in Vegas, Dr Nick flew out for the first couple of days, and then returned to Memphis.
This arrangement did not work well. Elvis's reliance upon a regime of drugs to get him going when he awoke and bring him down at bedtime was intensified by the concert schedule. Now, he needed amphetamines before a show, and then tranquillisers afterwards: and there were two shows every night. When he was around, Dr Nick tried to manage Elvis's intake. But when Dr Nick wasn't around, there was a roll-call of other doctors only too happy to fulfil the King's requirements. Doctors like Elias Ghanem and Thomas 'Flash' Newman - named for his ability to materialise at a moment's notice bearing anything you might desire. And after Priscilla left him in 1971, Elvis's behaviour became increasingly erratic. He spent more and more time in a chemical fog, taking whatever he could get his hands on.
In 1973, he overdosed twice on barbiturates: in February, when he spent three days in a coma in his suite at the Hilton, and later, on tour in St Louis. He began cancelling shows more and more frequently. At the end of the year he was admitted, semi-comatose, to the Baptist Hospital in Memphis. This time, he had been secretly seeing a doctor in LA. He had become poisoned by cortisone injections and was addicted to the high-test opiate painkiller Demerol. Dr Nick put him on meth-adone. Then he began trying to stop the flow of contraband pills from other doctors.
'Elvis's problem,' Dr Nick has said, 'was that he didn't see the wrong in it. He felt that by getting it from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street. He was a person who thought that as far as medications and drugs went, there was something for everything.'
While he was in hospital, Dr Nick and Elvis's road manager, Joe Esposito, raided Elvis's bedroom at Graceland: they found three giant pharmacy-sized jars, each containing 1,000 high-dose Seconal, Dexedrine and Placidyl. There were even vials of pills hidden in the seams of the curtains.
Afterwards, whenever Elvis went to see a dentist or another doctor for any reason, Dr Nick went with him, 'because he would always talk these guys into anything- crazy things'.
When Dr Nick refused to give him what he wanted, he'd just find another doctor. 'He'd get mad at me, and he'd get on his plane and fly to Vegas or Palm Springs or California and stay for a few days and get what he wanted. And I'd have to take it away from him when he got back home.'
This petulant hunger for drugs was such that, when Dr Nick thought Elvis was claiming symptoms he didn't have, he began to administer placebos.
'On the road,' he says, 'he was so afraid that he wouldn't get enough sleep to do a good show the next night that he would end up asking you for an extra pill or two. So those extra pill or twos would be placebos.'
Dr Nick and the guys would while away their spare hours on tour by making counterfeit pills for the King. 'We'd sit around,' he says, 'and, instead of playing cards, we'd make placebos. Ha!' Using syringes, they'd suck the liquid out of capsules and refill them with saline solution. When Elvis asked for a shot that he didn't need, Dr Nick would wait until his back was turned, squirt the liquid on the floor, and then 'inject' his patient with the emptied syringe. Tablets were trickier. Eventually, Dr Nick managed to persuade Knoll, the manufacturers of Dilaudid, Elvis's favourite painkiller, to press a special batch of a thousand pills without any active ingredients. It took a year of letter-writing and legal wrangling. But they looked just like the real thing. They cost him $5.98 apiece.
After a series of embarrassing on-stage disasters and show cancellations when other doctors tried their methods on Elvis, Dr Nick became the regular tour physician. Licensed only to prescribe drugs in Tennessee, he would stock up on 'supplies' before leaving the state. After the first couple of times out, he got to know what he would need in advance. He began each tour with three locked suitcases filled with prescription drugs.
'My job,' he says, 'was taking care of the whole entourage. There were about 150 people I took care of. You had a couple of bands. You had the songbirds. You had the people that set up the stage... And all these people were night people, too.'
Dr Nick made sure the drugs for Elvis were strictly controlled. On tour, Elvis would come to him at regular intervals: on waking; before the show; after the show; and at bedtime. Each time, he would be allowed specific uppers and downers in the lowest doses Dr Nick thought he could get away with. At home, without the excuse that he needed amphetamines to perform, Elvis was given just the manila envelopes of sleeping tablets - 'bedtime packet number one' and 'bedtime packet number two'- to be handed out separately during the night. During the 10 years he treated him, Dr Nick never knew Presley to sleep for longer than three hours at a stretch without waking up, looking for more pills.
Surrounded by watchful retainers; impossible to trust around a medicine cabinet; incapable of making decisions for himself: it's very easy to get the impression that Elvis was a stupid man.
'No, he was a very smart guy,' says Dr Nick. 'Not to have any college education... He was well read. Ha! He carried more books on the road than we carried drugs. I mean, he had three suitcases - three big steamer trunks, full of books. Religious books, metaphysical books, some medical stuff.'
Did he understand what he was doing to himself?
'No, I don't think he did.'
Do you think you were afraid of telling him what he needed to do?
'It's hard to convince somebody what's right and wrong or what they need to do. It's hard when you've got somebody that thinks they have all the answers and no matter what you throw at 'em, they've got answers for you.'
But why didn't he just trust you as a doctor?
'Well, I think he did. I think that's the reason I was around as long as I was.'
But he still ignored you when you said, 'Look, stop taking these pills.' Which presumably you did.
'Yeah. I mean, he was always childlike with these things. I don't think he ever realised how harmful these things could be to him. If he got a sore throat, and I gave him a penicillin tablet - I gave him 20 to take, saying, "You take four a day of these things until you use these up," - so he's going to take eight or 12 a day until he uses them up 'cos he thinks he'll get well faster that way.'
But that's the behaviour of a stupid man.
'I know. It was certainly a stupid decision on his part. But he wasn't a stupid man. He was really a smart guy. But he did a lot of stupid-assed things.'
Elvis Presley died on 16 August, 1977. At the time of his death, he was suffering from glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage and an enlarged colon. All of these ailments were aggravated, if not caused, by drug abuse. 'He didn't have any major heart problems,' says Dr Nick. 'Even with his obesity and everything - that's what really surprised me. I was dumbfounded that he died.'
Muutoin hyvän yleiskuvan Elvis Presleyn urasta saa lukemalla mm. Peter Guralnickin suomennetut teokset "Nuori Elvis: Viimeinen juna Memphisiin" ja "Graceland".
Vastaukset 3
Vanhimmat
Vittu juttua Elviksestä mut vaan enklanninks! Saisko saman suomeks? Mul oli enklanti 4 mut matikka oli 5 peruskoulun päättötotistuksessa. Siks mä olen talonmiäs nykysin...
Koska tietyllä Elvis-fanilla julistautuneella henkilöllä tuntuu olevan vaikeuksia englannin kielen kanssa (sattumoisin sama kieli,jolla herra Presley äänitti tuotantonsa), niin tässä pieni tiivistelmä.
Elviksen päihteiden käyttö alkoi oikeastaan 1950-luvun lopulla hän alettua ottaa AMFETAMIINIA sisältäviä pillereitä painonsa hallintaan ja samalla ne sotkivat hänen vuorokausirytminsä. Niinpä hän kehitti itselleen erilaisia piristeitä, rauhottavia ja unilääkkeitä sisältäviä "lääkecocktaileja". Elviksen oman logiikan mukaan kaikki apteekkitavara oli hyvästä ja jos yksi pilleri teki hyvää, niin 5 pilleriä teki sitäkin parempaa.
Hänen suosikkimömmöhinsä kuului mm. Dexdrine(amfetamiini), Demerol (voimakas opiaatti) ja kortisoniruiskeet. Esimerkiksi vuonna 1973 hänellä oli kaksi barbituraattien eli unilääkkeiden yliannostusta ja hän oli 3 päivää koomatilassa. On selvää, että Elviksen kuluttamilla eri sortin vahvoilla lääkeaineilla ei ole mitään tekemistä mahdollisten sairauksien hoitamiseen, vaan kyse oli pitkäaikaisesta päihderiippuvuudesta. Erityisesti Priscilla Presleystä tapahtuneen eron (1971) jälkeen Kingi vietti yhä enemmän aikaansa vahvassa "lääkehuurussa" ja kuten artikkelistä käy ilmi, hän tarvitsi ennen ja jälkeen konserttiesiintymisiään tietynlaiset mömmöt.
Edellämainitussa artikkelissä Presleyn henkilääkäri tri George Nichopoulus yritti parhaansa mukaan puolustaa omia tekemisiään, mutta toteaa olleensa aika voimaton, sillä mikäli Elvis ei saanut haluamiaan mömmöjä Dr. Nickiltä, hän hankki niitä muita tietä pitkin.
Kuka tässä maailmassa ilman mömmöjä pärjää.Niitähän ottaa jo perheen äiditkin.