Money, mania and LSD: A rich Malibu doctor’s tragic final weeks under yoga gurus’ sway
On Mother’s Day in 2018, Dr. Mark Sawusch tried LSD for the first time.
Standing on the sand in front of his Malibu beach house, he began his trip by joining hands with a pair of yoga gurus who had become his friends and caretakers in the final year of his troubled life. Soon after, a whale breached the ocean’s surface just 50 feet from the shore.
The gurus said Sawusch had researched and planned the experience for months, hoping it would provide some psychic solace and free him from his inner turmoil following years of struggling with bipolar disorder. Instead, it would trigger a terrifying downward spiral that would end with the doctor’s death at the age of 57, just two weeks later.
The details of Sawusch’s tragic final weeks were detailed in deposition testimony given in 2019 by the gurus, Anthony Flores and Anna Moore, as part of a civil suit brought by the doctor’s family who accused them of stealing millions from him as his mental state unraveled.
Earlier this year,
federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged the pair with allegedly being grifters who fed the doctor a steady stream of drugs to keep him discombobulated while they quietly transferred money from Sawusch, who had a personal fortune of some $60 million.
To help with Sawusch’s legal, medical and financial affairs, Flores and Moore hired several assistants. They also kept a staff of masseurs on standby to help the doctor relax, testifying that he sometimes received up to 10 hours of massages a day.
Flores and Moore have argued that everything was done at Sawusch’s direction, including taking drugs like LSD, marijuana and ketamine, an animal tranquilizer and club drug that has also been experimented with to treat severe depression. Both Flores and Moore have pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges federal prosecutors have made against them.
When Flores and Moore moved into Sawusch’s Malibu beach house, they described Sawusch as clearly being in need of help, expressing suicidal thoughts and heavily abusing alcohol, which exacerbated his mental health struggles. They said he spent many days walking around his house wearing an open robe with nothing underneath and talking to two seagulls who would often visit. He named the birds George and Madam George.
Two years earlier, Sawusch had been a highly successful eye surgeon with a practice in Pacific Palisades. Prosecutors say he also was a skilled investor and amassed a large fortune through shrewd and timely trading.
But then a short-lived marriage fell apart, and in 2016, Sawusch suffered serious burns to his hands when he touched a wire inside an electric piano in his home. The accident left him unable to continue getting malpractice insurance, derailing his career.
No one knows how much LSD Sawusch took in those final two weeks. Flores said the doctor kept hold of the vial and he couldn’t be sure if he had been dosing himself. When asked if he thought it was a good idea for someone with Sawusch’s mental health issues to be taking psychedelic drugs, Flores said he just was following the doctor’s orders.
For much of the day, Sawusch aggressively paced around the living room, talking to himself and the seagulls, George and Madam George, while looking out the window using binoculars he slammed into his face so hard it left bruising around his eyes.
Then he began drinking bottles and bottles of what appeared to be water and kombucha so excessively that it caused him to begin throwing up. He then started standing up and sitting down on the sofa over and over again.
Eventually, he sat down on the sofa and never got up again.
After an investigation by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office, Sawusch was determined to have died of a toxic mix of ketamine and alcohol. The death was deemed accidental.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/m...ic-final-weeks-under-yoga-gurus-sway-70a85907
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