LOS ANGELES — In the weeks before his death from a suspected accidental overdose, actor Corey Haim went “doctor shopping” and obtained at least 553 pills of prescription medications from seven different doctors and as many different pharmacies, California’s attorney general said Tuesday.
Attorney General Jerry Brown said Haim visited physicians at offices, urgent-care facilities and emergency rooms to obtain the potential deadly collection of pills and on one occasion used an alias. Brown said Haim’s case illustrates that prescribed drugs can be just as dangerous as street drugs, and that doctor shopping can be deadly.
“There are a lot of doctor shoppers and most of them aren’t celebrities,” Brown said.
Investigators released a report confirming that from Feb. 2 to March 5 — five days before he died — the star of such movies as “The Lost Boys” and “License to Drive” obtained more than 195 tablets of Valium, 194 tablets of the muscle relaxer Soma, 149 tablets of the painkiller Vicodin and 15 tablets of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug.
Haim, 38, was found unresponsive last month at his mother’s apartment. Los Angeles police officials said his death appeared to be an accidental overdose.
According to state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement investigators, Haim’s primary physician acknowledged the actor was addicted to pain medication. Brown said the actor obtained pain medication for injuries and prescriptions for depression.
The doctors responsible for prescribing the pills told state agents that Haim told them he had shoulder pain resulting from an incident while he was filming a movie in Canada. Haim also claimed he was not seeing any other doctors, and many of the physicians complained they felt “duped” by Haim.
On his visits to multiple pharmacies to fill his prescriptions, investigators found the actor either requested additional medication or asked for refills before the due date. Brown on Tuesday appealed for doctors to check with the state’s prescription-monitoring database before prescribing such medications.
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