halfacanuck

From Doctor Feelgood, the Observer magazine, regarding George "Dr Nick" Nichopoulos, personal physician to Elvis Presley:

This petulant hunger for drugs was such that, when Dr Nick thought Elvis was claiming symptoms he didn't have, he began to administer placebos.

'On the road,' he says, 'he was so afraid that he wouldn't get enough sleep to do a good show the next night that he would end up asking you for an extra pill or two. So those extra pill or twos would be placebos.'

Dr Nick and the guys would while away their spare hours on tour by making counterfeit pills for the King. 'We'd sit around,' he says, 'and, instead of playing cards, we'd make placebos. Ha!' Using syringes, they'd suck the liquid out of capsules and refill them with saline solution. When Elvis asked for a shot that he didn't need, Dr Nick would wait until his back was turned, squirt the liquid on the floor, and then 'inject' his patient with the emptied syringe. Tablets were trickier. Eventually, Dr Nick managed to persuade Knoll, the manufacturers of Dilaudid, Elvis's favourite painkiller, to press a special batch of a thousand pills without any active ingredients. It took a year of letter-writing and legal wrangling. But they looked just like the real thing. They cost him $5.98 apiece.