Here is an article that I read about Micheal Jackson’s Death from

http://www.lamag.com/article.aspx?id=19026

The title of the article is Behind the mask.

"Signs of Michael Jackson’s addiction were there—was anyone paying attention?

Los Angeles magazine, September 2009

When we heard about Michael Jackson’s death, it seemed somehow shocking, unexpected. Here was a man who was only 50, a world-famous entertainer gearing up for a major tour, and the devoted father of three young children. How did this happen? Why? In the midst of a global wash of mourning, questions surfaced and the answers all came back to the same place: drugs, pure and simple or pure and complicated, including a new one most of us had not heard of—Diprivan, a surgical anesthetic. A nurse made the TV rounds, saying Jackson had begged for the medication, while the names of doctors—people who purportedly had been Jackson’s suppliers—flashed through the media ether.

The star had apparently been mainlining legal drugs, in various combinations, for years, unable to stop, unable to kick the habit, unable to face the darkness within—whatever its origins. At the end of the day, Michael Jackson, icon to so many—and yes, I would include myself among them—died a junkie’s death no less than the homeless heroin abuser who dies alone in an alley. Jackson might have been living in a fancy house in Holmby Hills. He might have had expensive doctors administering to him. But he was the addict. He was taking the stuff—the painkillers and sleeping potions and that potent IV anesthetic. If his death was a shock, that’s only because we, his fans, were in denial as much as he was. 

After all, we had collectively watched him get nuttier and nuttier, thinner and thinner. In interviews he sounded like a frightened child, erratic and baby voiced. Along the way there had always been allegations of serious drug abuse; in 1993, Jackson admitted to taking pain medication and ended up in rehab in London. Obviously he didn’t—or couldn’t—stay clean.

For people who haven’t felt a twinge of such a craving themselves or haven’t been around that kind of obsession, the mania of it no doubt seems foreign and weak. I, alas, have a lot of respect for the hold it can take on a person, even a kind person, a sensitive person—as Jackson was often described. My father had great tenderness in him, but he was also an alcoholic, and I grew up in a household that danced to—and ducked—his moods. None of us were talking about alcoholism or addiction at that point. You didn’t tell your friends. You didn’t talk about it with other family members, not in any real way. You tiptoed through your childhood, holding your breath, waiting for him to take the drink that would push him into the mean, mad place. And then you shut up, made yourself small to escape his attention, or you went adorable and tried to placate him by putting the olive in his next martini. I became, at a very young age, an ace enabler, to use the AA parlance.

I consequently married a man who abused drugs and alcohol, and I watched him struggle, as I had my father. I was lucky. Both finally got sober; both got involved in the recovery world and I along with them. I ended up learning a lot about what drives the addict—the leftover childhood wounds, the sense of unworthiness, the secrets—and about the constant honesty and vigilance necessary to quell the desire for self-medication. One has only to look at the Michael Jackson of recent years, at the bizarrely inauthentic thing he had become—of which his altered appearance was so emblematic—to understand how far he was from that kind of personal reckoning. What did he think when he looked in the mirror?

Despite all the success and all the accolades, he was hiding behind that surgically sculpted mask, unwilling or unable to face the world or himself without something in his system to blunt the edges, numb the nerve endings. That’s what addicts seek—something to stop the feelings, and inevitably they need more and more of the intoxicant or intoxicants of choice, whether it be pills, booze, or shots. Jackson apparently availed himself of everything, grabbing whatever he could to still the hurt or the shame or the memories of the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father."