by PL

Over the years, the people close to Elvis have sold a tale to the fans about Elvis’s drug addiction that goes pretty much like this: “We couldn’t do anything about Elvis’s drug problem because he was too strong-willed and he’d just tell us to mind our own business.” Or, they’d ask, “How do you protect a man from himself?” Or they’d say that if someone challenged Elvis on his drug use, that person risked being expelled from Elvis’s circle.

Is any or all of this true? Sure, it may be true to the people who make these claims, and defend and deflect as they do, but the actual truth is that there was a simple way to help Elvis with his drug problem, and not one of these people took this course of action. The course of action was a pared-down version of an intervention.

An intervention, in general terms, is when friends and family confront a person about his addiction, and present the person with consequences if therapy is refused. The consequences are the key component: If X (happens, or doesn’t happen), then Y (is the consequence). Without going into all the specifics of the intervention process, with Elvis it could have been handled this way: Person A says, “Elvis, you have a problem with drugs. If you do not take steps to stop this behavior, I can no longer support you and be your friend.” If Elvis then tells Person A to get the hell out, then Person A accepts that result and leaves.

Next up, Person B does the same thing; if Elvis sends that person out the door, too, then Person B leaves.

Person C…same thing.

Person D…same thing.

Eventually, Elvis would have to face up to the fact that his friends are leaving him, and though he could simply ignore the problem and bid these people good riddance, the moral high ground belongs to Persons A, B, C, and D. They did the right thing. Their collective conscience is clear.

What I have seen in my study and research over the past 25 years is example after example of these people making excuses for why they sat on their hands and watched Elvis literally die right in front of them, as if there was nothing they could have done. But the huge red flag here is that the risk of expulsion seems to have been the only deterrent. That is, Elvis could get angry with them, or yell and scream, or whatever, but the worst outcome would be that the person challenging Elvis would be sent out the door. THIS is what they refused to risk. If you break it down, then, these people had this choice:

Offer to help Elvis get off drugs and if he rejects your offer of help, you leave.

or…

Do nothing and stay in the group (and continue to receive cars, cash, vacations, interest-free loans, jewelry, etc.), though your friend’s health and life would be at serious risk.

It is obvious which choice these people made, and it is obvious why they made that choice.

Shifting gears:

“Gaslighting” is a popular term these days, and in the case of Elvis’s friends and family telling us that they could do nothing to help Elvis, it seems applicable.

“…to gradually undermine the victim’s [fan’s] confidence in his own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood…reality from appearance…rendering him pathologically dependent on the gaslighter in his thinking and feeling.”

Sound familiar? It should. Elvis fans have been fed so many stories and claims over the years that lead them to believe so many things that are obviously not true. For example, listen to the way Dick Grob talked about Elvis’s drug use…Grob repeatedly told the fans that the drug abuse was made up or exaggerated…even though the evidence has always been right in front of us. A lot of fans buy into Grob’s nonsense.

What about the claim that Ginger found Elvis’s body and called the National Enquirer before she called for help? Same thing: year after year of the same words, phrases, and accusations…year after year after year…in interviews and magazine articles and books…the same words…the same phrases…it wears some people down until they accept it. “Oh, yeah, Ginger must have done that because I have read about it 500 million times, and the Stanleys and Dick Grob and Dr. Nichopoulos all say it’s true.”

And what about Dr. Nichopoulos and the drugs…who are you going to believe, his prescription pad, or your lyin’ eyes?

And NSG Henley…she took great care of Elvis, right? How do we know this? Because she says she did. And the apologists tell us she did. But did she…? Let’s ask her patient. Oh, wait.

So when you read that these people “did all they could,” and that Elvis’s doctor “did all he could,” and that “we tried,” and that “we gave him placebos,” and that “you wouldn’t understand unless you were there,” and all the other nonsensical things the fans are told/sold by these people, please remember that there were things that these people could have been done to help Elvis, they simply chose not to.

And they have collectively spent the past 46 years trying to convince us otherwise.