Traces of Chew-Z found in Michael Jackson’s blood, may have suffered from rare Barsoomzeolotus Disorder

The Valley Observer
July 6, 2009

LOS ANGELES -- As thousands of fans prepare to attend a memorial service in downtown Los Angeles tomorrow for the late singer and cultural icon Michael Jackson, an anonymous source close the Jackson family said that the recent autopsy performed by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's office revealed traces of a little-known drug called Chew-Z in Jackson’s blood, leading to speculation among a small group of mental health professionals that the King of Pop may have suffered from the compulsive condition known as Barsoomzeolotus Disorder (BZD).

According to a prominent psychiatrist in the Los Angeles area whose clients include Hollywood celebrities and members of the local literati, BZD is the inability to stop obsessing about the science fictional planet Mars created by early 20th-century pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The condition is caused by prolonged exposure at a young age to the novels of Burroughs’ Barsoom series, hence the name Barsoomzeolotus Disorder.

Asked to speculate on the possibility that Michael Jackson suffered from BZD, the psychiatrist said: “BZD is a serious mental health condition that may not be recognized by friends or even family members of the afflicted. With respect to Mr. Jackson, it is my understanding that he was an avid reader who was not only infatuated with Peter Pan, but was quite fond of John Carter, Warlord of Mars, the 1970s Marvel Comic book series adapted from Mr. Burroughs’s Barsoom novels. It is plausible that if Mr. Jackson spent considerable time immersed in these comic books, he could have developed BZD.

Several former employees of Michael Jackson, who did not want their names disclosed for fear of retribution, said that, in retrospect, there may have been some signs that the musical star suffered from BZD:

• When Jackson purchased his infamous Neverland Ranch in 1988, one of the names he considered was Marzana, a word play on Burroughs’s California ranch, Tarzana.

• Addressing a biographer in 1995, Jackson issued a taunt that might have been a confession: "Why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars?"

• When Jackson's daughter Paris Michael Katherine was born in 1998, he wanted to name her Princess Dejah Thoris, but a family attorney talked him out of it for fear Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. would sue Jackson.

• While making a documentary about the King of Pop in 2003, British reporter Martin Bashir observed Jackson pay “an obscene amount of money” for a marble and parcel-gilt chess set because Jackson believed it was a set for a game called Jetan. According to Bashir, “When we got back to the ranch, Michael explained that Jetan was the Martian equivalent of chess."

Although there is no known cure for Barsoomzeolotus, the psychiatrist from the Los Angeles area said that science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who penned the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and is believed to have suffered from BZD, was allegedly taking a little-known drug called Chew-Z in the late 1960s in an apparent attempt to alleviate his condition.

Taken intravenously and virtually unheard of to most recreational drug users and law enforcement officials, Chew-Z is believed to have been created in the mid 1960s by a former chemist living in a hippie commune in northern California. Acknowledging the drug’s existence and the dangers of taking it, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency said, "If there was any Chew-Z for sale, Mr. Jackson had the money and a network of acquaintances to obtain it."

However, a former member of several West Coast counterculture communes said that Chew-Z is an alien hallucinogen derived from a small meteor that came from the Proxima Centauri star system and crashed in northern California in the 1960s. “Chew-Z is grave shit. It’s for people who want to go a step-and-a-half beyond LSD, who want to experience the afterlife and aren’t worried about coming back." When told about the traces of Chew-Z found in Michael Jackson's blood, the man responded, "I've never heard of the guy, but if he wanted to get out of his head bad enough, Chew-Z would have helped him."

According to a unidentified middle-aged woman who works in a New Age bookshop in San Francisco and claims to have grown up in a hippie commune in northern California, “My mother used to say that if you take a lot of Chew-Z over a short period of time, you’ll develop three stigmata: a robotic right hand, artificial eyes, and steel teeth.” When asked if she thought Michael Jackson exhibited any of these features, the woman replied, “The glove, the sunglasses, all the facial reconstruction. Maybe!"

Pictured: Michael Jackson relaxing at Neverland with his Jetan set.