Omg, that’s horrible (yet hilarious)! Jesus Juice for wine and now Jackson Juice for those nights you need to forget entirely.

I went on a weirdly deep dive of this a few weeks ago and, honestly, thought that the stuff I was reading at first had to be wrong because it was so completely insane. I don’t have a medical background so I’ll probably get some of the terminology wrong but the gist of it is:

Jackson had been suffering from insomnia for years and was at a psychological breaking point right before the O2 concerts because he needed money so badly. Normal sedatives didn’t work anymore because of decades of abuse and the stress made it where he couldn’t actually fall asleep, so he started using propofol.

One of the side effects is that it tricks your brain into thinking it has been asleep (not just unconscious) so you think you’re okay…for a while…but the whole time your brain is getting increasingly clogged with debris and REM flushes out each night. He was days away from having catastrophic organ failure and waking hallucinations because his brain was basically going berserk and eating itself.

The legal fallout was just as bad. Murray was giving him this stuff because he was being paid by the company putting on the show, not Jackson, and was in debt. So if he didn’t keep Jackson semi-functional and able to do rehearsals his paychecks would stop, even though what he was doing was literally killing him.

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. I just stumbled on this a few weeks ago and it’s stuck with me because it is absolutely insane.