Conrad Murray was first awakened to the squalor of drug addiction when he was growing up in a dirt-poor, crime-ridden district of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad.
As he and his barefoot pals played cricket in the potholed streets, they would be tempted to try a less innocent form of entertainment by a woman known locally as 'the Coke Queen'.
Desperate to escape the grinding boredom of life in El Socorro, a rat-infested ghetto where people lived in tin shacks and drew water from a communal pump, some of his group succumbed.
Doctor and patient: Conrad Murray, right, and Michael Jackson
According to Murray's childhood best-friend, Wallace Leslie, however, the boy who was to become Michael Jackson's personal physician always refused to partake of the pusher's wares.
For even in those early years, the doctor's son harboured grandiose dreams of leaving Trinidad to become a wealthy and respected U.S. physician - and he wasn't about to allow his ambitions to be derailed by a descent into cocaine abuse.
So, as Dr Murray prepares to be charged with involuntary manslaughter, probably this week, for administering the powerful anaesthetic alleged to have killed Jackson, Mr Leslie can see the bitter irony.
'If anyone should have known better than to give drugs to Michael Jackson it was Conrad,' he told me, as we sat on his rickety wooden porch, near the simple brick-built house where Murray was raised.
'When I think how he grew up here and reached so far, just for this to happen, it just makes me sad. It's such a waste of everything he achieved.
From the start,
he behaved unprofessionally
'I keep asking myself why he would get mixed up in all this.
'I know he had problems paying maintenance for his kids (Murray has fathered at least seven children by a variety of women) so maybe he was trying to cover his debts quickly. Anyway, I feel sorry for him.'
Here Mr Wallace's wife, Saadia, angrily intercedes. 'Sorry for him? Why?' she cries. 'Anaesthetic should be used in hospitals. It's wrong!
'Maybe when you come from a poor background like this it affects you. Maybe you are always afraid of going back to the poverty you knew as a child. But that doesn't excuse it.'
Among Jackson's millions of fans, there are many who would agree with her.
Indeed, more than seven months after the singer died the hatred for his personal physician still runs so deep that he is expected to be advised to wear a bullet-proof vest during his Los Angeles trial.
An outwardly caring and professional cardiologist with practices in Texas, California and Nevada, Dr Murray first met Jackson in 2008, after being asked to treat one of his children for a cold.
For reasons that will doubtless form part of the prosecution's case, the singer quickly latched on to him, and some six weeks before his death enlisted Murray as his personal doctor
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1248329/Michael-Jackson-death-Dr-Conrad-Murray-quack-accused-killing-star.html#ixzz0eaonV4qE
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