Doctors told to provide drug records in Whitney Houston case

LOS ANGELES (MCT) — The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Wednesday that investigators have made contact with “a number” of doctors as they try to determine how Whitney Houston died.

Authorities collected several bottles of drugs from Houston’s suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where she was found dead Saturday. But officials have said the amounts of drugs did not seem unusually large, leaving it unclear whether the medications had anything to do with the singer’s death.

Officials are waiting for the results of toxicology tests on Houston’s body.

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier that the coroner was planning to serve subpoenas on doctors and pharmacists, seeking details about the drugs they found. Now, officials said they have made contact with some doctors.

“We’ve already contacted a number of doctors with requests for records,” Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter told The Associated Press. He stressed seeking the records is common in such cases.

“Subpoena power is one of the wonderful tools an investigator uses to get information from pharmacies and doctors,” added Dave Campbell, a retired captain from the coroner’s office. “You’re primarily seeking documents, not the persons who treated or prescribed, because you are doing a death investigation, not a criminal investigation.”

Campbell said investigators generally concentrate on the physicians most clearly connected to any prescription drugs recovered or conditions they know about. “Your saw a lot of this in the Michael Jackson case and I’m sure it will be useful in this incidence,” Campbell added, referring to the death investigation focusing on prescription drugs launched after the singer died in 2009.

He added that investigators would count the tablets in each container and compare them against the date of the prescription to see if the person was taking the correct dosage.

Defense attorney Ellyn Garofalo, who won acquittal for a physician charged with overprescribing drugs to Anna Nicole Smith, said investigators were probably going to be looking at several specific areas.

They will compare the amounts of prescription medications gathered from Houston’s room with the amounts of medication that were dispensed. They will look at which pharmacies dispensed the drugs and which doctor or doctors prescribed them. That information could be compared against the prescribing history of one or more doctors who treated Houston.