Prince’s bodyguard claims the late singer was not addicted to painkillers.
Although it has been widely reported that the 57-year-old musician developed a dependence on medication in order to deal with chronic hip pain, his minder Chris Gaither insisted that Prince was not addicted.
He told CNN: "I packed this man’s bag on the daily. I have been on tour with him for months. So if anybody had an addiction that would be something you would see. That would be something that you would know.
"He may have had an issue where he had to go to the doctor and they prescribed something for him, but as far as him abusing stuff, that’s not him. When it comes to health, he’s the fittest person. "Only time doctors would come in, they would give him a B-12 shot, something like that, when he might have been feeling sick or low on energy. But other than that, he wasn’t taking stuff. He had more energy than everybody just off his natural presence."
Chris also revealed that Prince sent him home for a week last month, something he often did when he wanted to rest, but just days later the ‘Purple Rain’ singer passed away at his Paisley Park estate.
He said: "I immediately stopped what I was doing. I couldn’t concentrate on anything I was doing after that. I went all over the world with him. And suddenly he was just gone.
"I was Prince’s bodyguard up until the day he died."
It was recently claimed that Prince died the day before he was due to meet with a doctor about an addiction to painkillers.
The musician’s representatives called Dr. Howard Kornfeld, a national authority on opioid addiction treatment, on April 20 and asked him to go to Prince’s home in Minneapolis because they were "dealing with a grave medical emergency".
While Howard could not travel from California immediately, he sent his son Andrew to go ahead and speak to Prince about his problem before he flew out the following day.
However, when Andrew arrived at Prince’s estate on April 21, he was nowhere to be found and he and two of the star’s employees eventually found him unresponsive in an elevator.
And it has also been reported that the week before his death, the singer was rushed to hospital in Moline, Illinois, for a "save shot", which is administered to counteract the effects of opiates, after being taken seriously ill on his private jet on the way back from a gig in Atlanta.
Prince’s bodyguard defends singer
