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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Opioids Found in Prince's Home; FBI Serves Warrants in San Bernardino Attack. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired April 28, 2016 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00] ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR, "AC 360": But it's a little weird to hear from your - about your mom's dating life, to learn it's been more interesting than your own. But, you know, she's very honest. If you're going to do a film like this, you want it to be honest. And that's really what it is.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: And if anyone - as working with you, everyone knows, you're a very private person.

COOPER: Yes.

BOLDUAN: But this is a very - this is a very - personally, a very public project.

COOPER: Yes.

BOLDUAN: How - why?

COOPER: You know, I just think if - I mean we did this. We did this book, "The Rainbow Comes and Goes" and we just thought, you know, if we're going to do this, we should - it should be honest and open and I have no problem - you know, I've - I sort of feel like it has no reality that is out there that people are actually seeing it, even though clearly people are seeing it. It's doing - been doing really well on HBO.

BOLDUAN: Doing quite well.

COOPER: And the book is number one. So - but, yes, it just - I don't really think about that. To me it's just a very personal thing and I got to know my mom in a whole new way before it's too late.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: That's great. Really, it's great.

BOLDUAN: It's great to see you.

COOPER: Yes.

BERMAN: Anderson, thanks so much.

You can watch this documentary. You can see it, too, "Nothing Left Unsaid," here on CNN tomorrow night at 9:00 p.m..

BOLDUAN: Thank you all so much for joining us AT THIS HOUR.

BERMAN: LEGAL VIEW with Ashleigh Banfield starts now.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. And welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

One week today since the death of legendary entertainer Prince, and officials still effectively mum on what caused him to die. The autopsy and the toxicology results are still not being made public, but we have learned one thing for sure, if prescription drugs weren't directly responsible, Prince was certainly surrounded by them. A law enforcement official is telling CNN that investigators found pills in his home and even on his person. Pain killers, powerful drugs called opioids. They're normally and carefully supplied by a doctor.

But let's not be naive about this. We all know that people can get their hands on most drugs if they want them badly enough. Because of the drugs discovery, we are now told that the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, is now active in this investigation, looking at the types of pills that were found in the house and working backwards to try to figure out where they came from.

Remember that Prince had that emergency landing situation just a few days before he died. And officials believe that the, quote, "unresponsive" singer was having a reaction to some kind of pain medicine, and that is according to a source here at CNN.

Outside Minneapolis now and live to Stephanie Elam, who is standing by at Prince's Paisley Park compound and his estate.

Stephanie, what exactly are those investigators doing at the house and specifically what are they looking for, other than what they've already found?

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right. Well, that's the question here, Ashleigh, is how do all these pieces go together? The fact that he had these strong opioids on him and in his house. They also want to know, and this is where the Drug enforcement Administration steps in here because what they're looking to find out is where he was getting these pills, if someone was prescribing them to him, and if perhaps he was being oversubscribed. And then playing that into what happened about the week before he died with that emergency landing of his private plane in Moline, Illinois, and the fact that they do believe he was treated for an overdose, that's what we are hearing at this point, trying to put those together to see if these two incidents are related, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: So who's in charge? I mean when you get the feds all of a sudden coming into a local investigation certainly with this kind of headline making mechanisms, there can be some tension. Is it - is that showing up in this at all or does it seem like they both have the same focus, and that is, let's find out who may have been behind this?

ELAM: Yes, the question about that is so much it is being handled behind the scenes, but I think that the fact that the federal agency is being involved in this shows that the local agency believed there was enough of a reason to reach out. There's so many different facets of this investigation that continue to come out about Paisley Park and what was going on inside, the fact that he was in there by himself, lots of different questions. But it looks like, at least on this angle of the - of the - looking into what happened to Prince, the federal agency is stepping in here.

BANFIELD: All right, Stephanie Elam standing by in Chanhassen for us with that story. Thank you for that.

I want to bring in Michael Levine, who's a former DEA agent, and Danny Cevallos, our legal analyst here at CNN.

If I can begin with you, Michael, I'm so curious as to what some of those agents might actually be doing at Paisley Park. And since you've been on the inside, maybe you can help me navigate what exactly is happening now?

MICHAEL LEVINE, FORMER DEA AGENT: Just the fact that the local police brought DEA in tells me that indictments will soon follow.

BANFIELD: Really?

LEVINE: Yes. I can - I can - if this was Las Vegas, I would give you 10-1 that indictments will follow. And those indictments will range from state and federal narcotic violations to homicide. When I say homicide, if I gave - if I knew that you were drug dependent and I knew that you were in bad physical condition, that's not even necessary, but if I gave you the pills anyway, and you subsequently die, well, that's reckless indifference. And reckless indifference to your safety and your life is homicide.

[12:05:31] So that's where we're heading. I can almost guarantee that that's what is going to come off. If - if the DEA is in there, they are going to first want to go back - it sounds to me like there's an enormous amount of tracks, an enormous amount of evidence to work over, not excluding even the people who were on the plane with Prince. But the commentator was exactly right in that you want to get the source of the pills and - or the source of the drugs. And there's - and there may be multi sources. You know -

BANFIELD: Yes. Yes.

LEVINE: Yes. And -

BANFIELD: That - that's the next issue, obviously, the multi sources and the idea that some people doctors shop and sometimes doctors don't know about that.

Michael, stand by for one moment. I want to bring in Danny Cevallos on this because they're - look, when you're talking about things as serious as homicide and then, you know, anything from manslaughter to say second degree, these become extraordinarily serious charges. We looked at the protractive (ph) litigation that Michael Jackson's doctor went through and was found guilty of. It is so difficult to take a pill bottle or a baggy and connect that to one particular doctor, especially if there are many involved.

DANNY CEVALLOS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, if it's a baggy, a sandwich baggy, yes. But if it's in a regular - one of those little prescription pill container, those have all kinds of information on them pursuant to the controlled substances act. And the other thing that we have to remember is that prosecuting doctors for overprescribing and for overdose deaths is a relatively new phenomenon. We went through almost 200 years of our country without the federal government or local state governments taking much interest in prosecuting doctors. It's only with the rise of the controlled substances act in 1970 and then also some of this concierge medicine that we're seeing now, like we saw with Michael Jackson, where people pay doctors for their personal services -

BANFIELD: Right.

CEVALLOS: To be their sort of - their conciliary (ph) of medicine. Those are some of the factors that have led to this rise in prosecuting doctors for overprescribing. But whether it's under the Controlled Substances Act or it's a theory of criminal negligence, you still have to show the mens rea. You have to show that a doctor knowingly did this.

BANFIELD: Knew.

CEVALLOS: Knowingly or disregarded -

BANFIELD: Right.

CEVALLOS: Consciously disregarded some known risk in prescribing. And, at that level, we're not talking about driving cars or shooting guns. Medical science is highly complex.

BANFIELD: Yes. And so, Michael, to that point, does the - does the DEA have any kind of tracking mechanism whereby, you know, short of a registry of exactly what's being prescribed to every individual patient, which I'm sure HIPAA would go ballistic over, how could they possibly know that a doctor who supplies a patient who's already been supplied by someone else, and oversupplied say by a third, fourth or fifth sources, how can they connect that mens rea to the doctor, find that that doctor was reckless because he just didn't care about all those other prescriptions? How can they absolutely know that he didn't know about them?

LEVINE: They - they can and they will, particularly in this case. You know, what was just mentioned is really important in that the attention to doctors having appropriately diagnosed and prescribed the drugs has put a lot of doctors on edge and they will not even prescribe drugs, which puts a lot of their patients who are truly suffering pain, like people in my own family, who then have to look elsewhere to address their pain issues. And Prince may well have been one of those. We don't know. We won't know until the investigation occurs. But the -

BANFIELD: Yes.

LEVINE: In the law, the law requires an appropriate face-to-face examination by the doctor who prescribes those drugs. So part of the job is to see if that actually happened or did the doctor not, I suppose as in the Michael Jackson case -

BANFIELD: Right.

LEVINE: Where he was just providing drugs. But that will all come to light. It has to. There's too -

BANFIELD: Yes. And we need to be really clear, we're still waiting on tox. So we don't even know what those reports say yet. The fact that he had opioids on him, it's one piece of a very big puzzle, but it's certainly not an answer.

Danny, one other issue that's some to light and is being confirmed by the police, the local police, is that indeed the most bizarre development in all of this, Prince did not have a will. I thought there was not a possibility, considering his business acumen, that he didn't have a will. So now?

CEVALLOS: Here's what's amazing about that. Yes, Prince didn't have a will and he had this vast estate. And a lot of the people who are saying, I can't believe Prince didn't have a will. A lot of you don't have wills. Many people do not have wills. Even people with significant assets, whether you have an estate like Prince's or whether you just have a collection of commemorative plates and you don't have a whole lot -

[12:10:18] BANFIELD: Danny, when you're worth $300 million plus and your future earnings could be worth well over a billion, that still holds true?

CEVALLOS: People take the view, for some unexplained reason, especially when they don't have children or a spouse, that what the heck, when people are going - probating my estate, I won't be around to worry about it. Maybe that's part of the reason why so many Americans don't bother to set up wills to look after even their loved ones or their children or their family. It's just too depressing to think about. It's amazing to think that from everyone from the regular guy all the way up to somebody like Prince that phenomenon occurs. And I guess the lesson is, it never hurts to plan ahead.

BANFIELD: Yes. Well, usually it's kids, obviously, that gets people thinking about these things, but without children at age 57 we thought in relatively good health I guess we can understand. But at $300 million, it is - it's astounding, just astounding. And the state will certainly get its share of that as well.

Danny Cevallos, thank you for that.

Michael Levine, thank you as well for your insight. We do appreciate it.

The story is odd. The story is strange and it is still evolving, but the prospect of powerful addictive pain killers takes the investigation into Prince's death to a whole new level. And it raises so many questions. Who better to answer them than our own expert on all things addiction, especially when it's celebrity related, that's your guy on the left, Dr. Drew Pinsky, coming up in just a moment. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:15:33] BANFIELD: The death investigation of Prince's death is now a drug investigation. At least a big part of it is anyway because we're being told that the DEA is now on the site at Prince's home and that police have found controlled drugs, prescription only stuff, in his house and even on his person.

I want to get Dr. Drew Pinsky in here, who's an addiction specialist, host of HLN'S "Dr. Drew."

So we just talked, Drew, about the criminal aspect of this and what doctors might actually face if someone is able to connect bad prescriptions to doctors, whoever the suppliers were. But I want to take it a step back right now and talk about Prince the person and how he might have died, because we don't know yet that he overdosed. I need to ask you, what is the possibility that Prince was taking prescribed medication the way he should have and still dropped dead in that elevator?

DR. DREW PINSKY, HOST, HLN'S "DR. DREW": Ashleigh, approaching 100 percent. Let me just say that - and, first of all, we've been covering this all week on HLN. We're going to cover it again tonight. I've been chanting about these opioids for I don't know how many years now. I knew it was a part of the story here with poor Prince.

The fact is the medicine that has been talked about was Percocet, which is an opioid pain medication. That name kept coming up. Eighty- one percent of the Percocet - I just looked this up - prescribed in the world, 81 percent of Percocet in the world between 1991 and 2013 was prescribed in the United States of America. Nearly 100 percent of the Vicodin in the world. Do we have more pain in this country? No. We are bizarrely liberal with our prescribing of opioids.

The real problem is, as you were saying, Ashleigh, it can be precisely as prescribed. It doesn't have to be abused. When you add in a benzodiazepine medication, a sleep medicine, an anxiety medicine, that is a potentially lethal combination, particularly if somebody has some kind of underlying medical problem. So my hunch is that that's what happened here. That he has some sort of underlying issue. He was appropriately - appropriately prescribed opioids. Though, again, why so much of it? Why so prolonged (ph)? And then a benzodiazepine added in and somebody could easily die of that combination.

And, in fact, I was listening to that DEA agent and Danny and thinking, I love hearing other people talk about the practice of medicine. One hundred percent of the patients (INAUDIBLE) patients that have died of addiction in the last seven years were given this combination of medicine as prescribed. It is a -

BANFIELD: By the same doctor, though, Drew? I mean, my God, would the same doctor give the opioid and the benzodiazepine, which is a lethal combo?

PINSKY: Many times. Many times. It's just the awareness of how serious this problem is, is just very poor. These are very - both are casually prescribed. They're casually prescribed together. And, listen, if - if that DEA agent were right, there would be 40,000 doctors in jail right now. The fact is, I'm sure that this was prescribed appropriately, it's just a little too much and a little, you know, sort of inappropriate situation and that creates real trouble.

BANFIELD: So, Drew, we're just looking at picture after picture of Prince on stage performing. And this is how everybody knows him and remembers him. And it is not hard to see from the pictures, he was a very slight man. He was, according to the Associated Press, about 5'2". The guesses on his weight were anywhere from like 110 to 125 or 130. My concern is this, how often are prescriptions for pain killers, which, by the way, I would say the majority of the audience watching right now have at one time been prescribed fairly and justly, but how often are these prescriptions wrong? The amount that is actually given to you? The number of hours within which you need to avoid them? How often is it wrong given your body type, your metabolism, your energy level, all these different factors?

PINSKY: It's not that. It's not that.

BANFIELD: It's not?

PINSKY: It's not that at all. It's not that they're inappropriately prescribed, it's that they're too casually prescribed and they're given too high a quantity over too long a period of time. Things are then activated, like the disease of addiction, that doctors don't know how to identify. Their patients are cut off. You heard the DEA agent reference this, then they're cut off and now we have the heroin epidemic. That's where that came from. It's just a - you know, you can just follow - connect the dots. I've been talking about this for years. It's stunning to me that we have to lose a genius before people wake up to this.

Listen, it's so sad. Again, the other thing about this, Ashleigh, is I don't believe - I'm going to be - these are splitting hairs a little bit, but I don't think Prince was an addict per say. In other words, you don't hear a long story of struggling and progression and people being concerned about him.

[12:20:06] BANFIELD: No.

PINSKY: You hear nothing like that. You hear suddenly, boom.

BANFIELD: You hear the opposite, Drew.

PINSKY: Yes, the opposite, exactly. You hear suddenly trouble. And that trouble was around prescribed medication. You don't die of illicit drugs in America anymore. You die of a prescription drug. That's how it happens.

BANFIELD: I think I might have lost you, Drew. I'm so sorry. It just went - it just went silent for a minute. But we're going to continue to watch this, Drew. I appreciate your insight. And, again, I need to remind our viewers, while we're having this discussion, at the same time we are still waiting to find out if the autopsy suggests this was an overdose or if this was something unrelated to the drugs that were found in his home and on his person.

But, Drew, you're just remarkable with your insight and I wish you didn't have to cover this story over and over again for people to wake up to these awful dangers. Drew, thank you, thank you so much. A quick plug for your show as well. Drew's show is on HLN, 7:00 p.m. Eastern each night. And clearly he's at the forefront of this story. Very insightful, a great guest and he knows a lot himself, so I encourage you to tune in, especially to these particular details.

We also have some breaking news. The FBI says that warrants were served today and they're related to the San Bernardino shootings from months ago. Who got them? What's it about? And what about the connection to the iPhone? The search of the iPhone, is this connected?

We also have quite a day on the campaign trail today. Guess which prominent Republican just called Ted Cruz, quote, "Lucifer in the flesh." And that might have been the nicest thing in the litany of complaints. So there's another candidate in this mix on your screen right now that just laid off a few hundred staffers. That's foreboding. And which famous chair throwing basketball coach just threw some support behind Donald Trump? We're going to have all those answers.

Speaking of Donald Trump, we're going to hear from him live with plenty to say about all of this and more. That's at the top of the hour. Live mics are ready. Flags are fancy. Back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:26:34] BANFIELD: We're got breaking news here at CNN. We're learning that the FBI is right now serving warrants today all related to that terrible attack in San Bernardino that happened back in December. It was the man in white, the murders, naturalized U.S. citizens, born in Pakistan, who opened fire on a county meeting at holiday time. Fourteen people killed. CNN's Kyung Lah watching this story from our bureau in Los Angeles. And CNN legal analyst Danny Cevallos is also with us to help sort of plod through what these warrants could mean, who they could be for.

Kyung, the big question is, warrants. That could be anything from search to arrests. Do we know exactly the nature of these and how they ended up coming now?

KYUNG LAH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: All we know at this point, Ashleigh, is that the FBI is confirming that warrants have indeed been served today. What we are hearing is that they were served in Corona and elsewhere. It's simply one line that we're hearing, that the FBI was working with their partners and that those warrants were served in Corona and elsewhere.

What I can tell you from having covered this story is that the key address in Corona is the address of the brother and father of the gunman, Syed Rizwan Farook. Those two lived there, as did Enrique Marquez, the man who was charged with material support for terrorism. So it's a key address. This is a home where the father, the brother and a man who was arrested for terrorism, for that material support for terrorism, all resided at.

We don't know exactly why those warrants were executed. We know that Enrique Marquez, that there were some marriage fraud issues. He was charged with visa and marital fraud. There was also the FBI able to break into the iPhone very recently of the gunman. What we don't know though is exactly why they were executed today, what time. We just know that they are ongoing and it has happened in Corona and elsewhere today according to the FBI.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: So - yes, just so that I'm really clear, when you say Corona, are you saying that those people, the brother and the father of Syed Farook, lived in Corona and we know that the warrant is Corona, or we actually know an address, that that warrant is being served at that address where they lived?

LAH: We don't have an exact address.

BANFIELD: OK.

LAH: What we have from the FBI is that these warrants were served in Corona and elsewhere. We're still trying to determine if they were executed at that particular address. But I can tell you, again, from having covered this story, the only address that we were really paying attention to in Corona is the address of the father and the brother and that address that Enrique Marquez listed as his home address in Corona.

BANFIELD: Yes. And he's - he's facing the material support charges you already mentioned.

Really quickly, the iPhone. That's been the biggest headline since this horrible terrorist attack in December, Kyung, and we've been following this and you've been at the leading edge of the coverage of what the FBI has had to go up against to get the information off Syed Rizwan Farook -

LAH: Rizwan Farook -

BANFIELD: His iPhone, pardon me, his iPhone. The FBI had it. They couldn't get into it. They begged Apple for help. It became a national story. Instead, they just went the other route. They paid over a million dollars to get that phone hacked. And they said they did it. They said they got it, but they never told us what they got. Do we think that today's warrants are directly in relation to getting the material off the phone?

[12:30:00] LAH: To be frank, we don't. We don't know exactly if this is related to the marriage fraud that they were investigating, the agents were investigating, the charges that were levied against Enrique Marquez, or if this is in relation to the