Unsealed court records detail the pills found at Prince's home after his death


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Court records released Monday from the investigation into Prince's death last year show that painkillers, none of which were prescribed to him, were found in his Paisley Park estate after his fatal overdose.
The records reveal that the day before he died on April 21, Prince communicated with a California doctor who specializes in addiction treatment, the Los Angeles Times reports. The doctor was unable to fly to Prince's home in Minnesota, so he sent his 26-year-old son, who is not a licensed doctor, to evaluate the musician. The son arrived at Paisley Park with Prince's friend and bodyguard, Kirk Johnson, and his assistant, who found Prince's body. Investigators also found "narcotic medications" inside vitamin bottles, the records show, but they do not state how he secured fentanyl, the powerful opioid he took before his overdose death.
The week before his death, Prince overdosed on an airplane, and was revived. At the time, his doctor of around a month, Michael Schulenberg, wrote an oxycodone prescription for him, but wrote it for Johnson in order to protect "Prince's privacy," Schulenberg told investigators. The records also show that the state's prescription database that pharmacists use to check for drug abuse did not contain any prescription under Prince's name. Read more about the unsealed records at the Los Angeles Times.
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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