He had come to have his hunches about some of the doctors who abuse their prescribing rights, but won’t name them on the record. “Not all of them are these so-called concierge doctors. Not at all,” he told me. “Many have regular practices. It is well-known that a very high percentage, maybe half, of all enabling doctors have their own prescription or alcohol problems. They have developed co-dependent relationships with their patients, and their drug-pushing has become part of their identity. By continuing to enable a famous person, as a doctor you have control over them. The star is dependent on them.”

Many people forget that the 62-year-old Chopra is a medical doctor, one heavily involved in continuing research. He cited a series of clinical studies that establish that, for some people, the heavy use of opiates causes hyperalgesia, a condition in which the drugs damage the peripheral nerves and actually increase the level of pain.

“So what you have in Hollywood between the wealthy and celebrities,” said Chopra, “is that almost all these excessive prescriptions are written by doctors without any training in the field of addictionology, an emerging speciality. As a result, the doctors keep increasing the dosage and the frequency in an attempt to alleviate the pain, and in some cases they make it worse. Once the patient’s pain increases, the patient has no idea they have developed hyperalgesia. So they think, ‘If I wasn’t taking narcotics, it would be even worse.’ The drug-pushing doctor has them trapped.

“I have had major celebrity clients, of the same stature as Michael Jackson, ask me for drugs. And when I probe them about why they need it, they never call me back. These are very high-profile people. But I am firm. ‘Don’t you ever ask me for that again,’ I tell them.”

Years ago, after Chopra rose to fame, he was at a Hollywood party packed with A-list celebrities. The next day, he said he got a call from a pharmacist “confirming a refill for a top star,” for a large order of a controlled substance. “I had just met that person at the party the day before. I told the pharmacist I never wrote it. And then I called the person and confronted them,” he said.

It was not the last time it happened. “I stopped going to Hollywood parties as a result,” he told me. “But for every doctor like me who says no, there are many more who will not say anything to that pharmacist when they call, even though they know they did not write the prescription. The allure in Hollywood of gaining a major star as a new patient is too much for some doctors to bypass.”

Deepak’s voice is heavy with emotion when he talks about Michael Jackson. He had met the singer in 1988, when he had been invited to Neverland as part of a daylong party: “And he was so shy, he barely said anything.” At one point, Chopra discovered a jukebox. It was coin-operated, and Jackson urged him to play a song. “So to tease him, I did not play one of his songs, but instead chose Saturday Night Fever. And Michael smiled when he heard for the first chords. Then he started dancing and suddenly that shy boy transcended in front of me into someone completely different.” They played music all night, and Jackson was “unstoppable.”

The two became quick friends. Jackson would stay with Chopra and his wife when they lived in Massachusetts, and Chopra accompanied him occasionally on tour. The Jackson he met and grew to like was initially not only drug-free, “but he didn’t touch a drop of alcohol, not even aspirin. He would only drink water. He had been raised by his mother [as a Jehovah’s Witness] to use nothing at all, and it was still part of his life.”

Jackson lived a “holistic” life when Chopra met him, and the wellness guru taught him how to meditate. Over time, they spent long hours in overnight conversations, and Jackson opened up to Chopra as if he were a therapist. It was in those talks that Chopra learned about what a tortured soul Jackson was.

Jackson shared with him intimate details about the violent household in which he grew up. “He was very damaged from his childhood,” Deepak told me. His father had been physically abusive and also verbally taunted him for having too big a nose and being weak and ugly. When Jackson had gone to “witness” for his religion—where Jehovah’s Witnesses go door to door to proselytize about their faith—he had hated it, he told Chopra, and sometimes strangers would chase Jackson away screaming obscenities and insults. A patchiness to his skin made him feel odd, and he refused ever to put on a bathing suit and go swimming, no matter how many times friends urged him to do so.