LONDON - King of Pop Micheal Jackson was hooked on to painkillers after acid treatments to burn and whiten his skin left him in agony, according to a former nurse.

The pop legend underwent countless laser facial peels and bleaching treatments as his obsession with peeling back layers of skin grew but the processes were so painful he took a cocktail of drugs, including tranquilliser Diprivan to numb his senses, and allegedly begged doctors to sedate him for three days at a time, reports thesun.co.uk.

Kathryn Buschelle, the long-term partner of one of Jackson’s plastic surgeons, even claims the star once cheated death when he struggled to come round from a drug-induced sleep.

“Michael’s obsession with his appearance led to more and more skin treatments, and his subsequent addiction to Diprivan led to even more. It was an insane cycle. He was literally burning his skin off and then being knocked out like a zombie, she said.

“It reads like a horror movie script. Towards the end of the 1990s he was a dead man walking, that’s how zoned out he was,” she added.

Buschelle revealed Jackson’s fixation with surgery grew after he received a skin graft following the damage to his nose.

“There were many more grafts, during which Michael could see that he could achieve a lighter skin tone through peeling layers and layers of skin along with lightening agents. Michael, I was told, spotted the white skin beneath, which excited him. It prompted him to progress on to bleaching, acid facial peeling, and then on to laser treatments,” she said.