Deanna Adler alleges in her new book Sweet Child of Mine that Dr. Howard Kornfeld, the California addiction specialist called to help Prince in the final days of his life with pill addiction, pushed a shocking amount of drugs on her son, original Guns N’ Roses drummer Steven Adler. Kornfeld reportedly arrived to Prince’s residence with Suboxone to help him kick his pill addiction.
“I am so blessed that my son is still alive,” despite the doctor “overprescribing” meds to him, Adler told The New York Post in an interview last week.
Adler turned to Kornfeld after he was busted for driving under the influence in 1995. After several weeks in the hospital to detox, Steven was released to continue treatment on his own at a nearby rental.
His mother writes she was shocked when she received the first pharmacy bill for more than $2,000.
“What kind of scam was this?” she writes. “What the hell was going on?”
The book includes a list of 63 prescriptions her son was prescribed in one month, including Prozac, Valium amd Antabuse — used to treat alcoholism — and lithium, for bipolar disorder.
She said she researched the meds and learned why they were prescribed.
“But I could not fathom, and they never answered to my satisfaction, why they needed to have two different types of psychotics, or three different sleeping-aid medications or five different types of pain killers,” she writes. “Even I know you shouldn’t mix Darvocet, Percodan and Tylenol with codeine.”
Adler completed three months of treatment with Kornfeld and immediately relapsed.