All the Celebrities Who Have Struggled With Drug or Alcohol Addiction
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Drew Barrymore, Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck — people from all different walks of life battle addiction whether they’re doctors, lawyers, students, stay-at-home moms, professional athletes or performers. And while some struggle in silence for many years, it’s important for them to know that they’re not alone.
When celebrities who have struggled with drug or alcohol addiction speak out, they send a powerful message — and Demi Moore, Jessica Simpson, Oprah Winfrey, and more stars have all made that brave choice.
Demi Moore opened up about her addiction struggles on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk, letting her daughters speak candidly about how their mother’s addiction had affected them. “It was not the mom that we had grown up with,” Tallulah Willis shared about Moore’s most recent relapse. Talking to Harper’s Bazaar, Moore described the same relapse as “giving my power away,” and vowed to recommit herself to sobriety.
The more stars can help normalize addiction struggles, the easier it is for people to admit they need help and seek treatment. These celebrities and their honesty underline the fact that addiction doesn’t discriminate, and struggling with addiction is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a human experience that, in order to beat, one must first face head-on.
Click through our slideshow of celebrities who’ve struggled with drug and alcohol addictions — and don’t ever be afraid to reach out for help.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, you can get help by calling the Drug Addiction Hotline at 1-877-813-5721.
A version of this article was originally published in August 2015.
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Billie Joe Armstrong
Green Day icon Billie Joe Armstrong talked about his issues with mental health and substance abuse, when talking about the group’s new album Saviors to People.
“It definitely deals with mental health and addiction,” Armstrong said. “When I say, ‘I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ that could be looked at two different ways. It could be someone going, ‘F—, yeah. I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ at a party, or it could be someone that’s fallen. That’s what it means to me, anyway.”
He added, “For me, alcohol gets in the way of everything, from my relationship with my family to just trying to get a good night’s sleep. It gets in the way of my happiness. So that’s why really I wanted to quit, and I was done. So with the friends that I have, I’m still able to go out and go listen to some music, see some band or go to a party — and it’s still a fun, sexy kind of evening, even though there’s no alcohol. And then the next day, I wake up … ” Armstrong adds. “I’m just tired. Now there’s no shame and hangover and all that s—. I feel really good.”
Adele
In October 2023, Adele revealed that she stopped drinking three months ago.
“I stopped drinking maybe like three and a half months ago,” Adele said during a Las Vegas concert, per People. “I mean, I was literally borderline alcoholic for quite a lot of my 20s.”
Landon Barker
In a recent interview with People, Travis Barker’s 20-year-old son Landon Barker revealed he struggled with alcohol abuse in 2022 after he and his father were going through medical complications. “I think 100 percent it’s important for me to not make that a habit again,” he told the outlet. “I always tell myself, ‘I’ll only drink on special occasions now,'” he added. “I just steer away from everything.”
Jared Leto
Actor and 30 Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto recently opened up about his journey with drugs in a tell-all interview with Zane Lowe. “I was always interested in drugs. I was always interested in an experience. I was interested in taking some risk,” Leto told Lowe, per Page Six.
“Addiction is a whole another part of it, of course,” Leto continued. “Taking drugs is one thing, but does it start taking you?”
Leto then added that that’s exactly what happened to him over time. “I took it for a ride, and then it took me for a ride for sure,” he revealed.
His addiction stopped, however, following a “moment of clarity.” “I had an epiphany. There were two paths that I could take in life. I guess is the only way I can describe it,” he explained. “I took that path. I’ve had very close friends that didn’t, and they’re not here anymore. Many.”
Ryan Phillippe
Actor Ryan Phillippe recently opened up to his followers about being sober following longtime substance abuse. “Officially the longest I’ve gone since I was a teen without some kind of nicotine or marijuana in my system (among other things…),” Phillippe revealed on Instagram alongside a mirror selfie. “Feeling thankful for the freedom that comes with breaking addictions and dependency on substance. Sobriety, clarity, and spiritual connectedness feels real good 🙏.” We’re so happy for you!
Paige
Former WWE superstar Paige, who is currently working on a team known as The Outcasts for WWE’s rival company All Elite Wrestling (AEW), recently opened up about her brave battle with addiction. She is five years sober, and credits her boyfriend Ronnie Radke for helping her overcome her alcohol dependency, per DailyMail. But as for her drug addiction, she talked about how many didn’t think she could beat her addiction, but as she said: “Everyone thought I couldn’t do it. But I did.’
Bradley Cooper
During a Season 2 episode of National Geographic’s Running Wild With Bear Grylls, Oscar-nominated actor and director Bradley Cooper opened up about his struggles with drugs and alcohol and his journey with sobriety.
“You definitely had some wild years,” Grylls said, per Variety. “In terms of alcohol and drugs, yeah,” the A Star Is Born star responded. “But that had nothing to do with fame, though. I was lucky, I got sober at 29 years old, and I’ve been sober for 19 years. I’ve been very lucky.”
Danny Trejo
Danny Trejo recently revealed he’s celebrating his 55th year sober! “I’m 55 years clean and sober today by the grace of God!” the actor wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) alongside a photo of him smiling from ear to ear. “I’ve done this one day at a time, and for anyone out there struggling YOU CAN TOO!” Previously, the actor has been open about his drug use and being incarcerated for possession of drugs, dealing and armed robberies, per USA Today.
Tom Holland
The Crowded Room star Tom Holland recently opened up about his journey with alcohol addiction in an interview with Jay Shetty Podcast. “I was definitely addicted to alcohol, not shying away from that at all,” Holland said, adding that he initially just decided to do a “dry January” back in 2022. “All I could think about was having a drink … I was waking up thinking about it. I was checking the clock, when’s it 12 p.m.? It just really scared me,” he remembered.
Noticing his dependence, Holland then challenged himself once again to stay sober until his birthday in June. “By the time I got to June 1, I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life,” he said. “I could sleep better. I could handle problems better, things that would go wrong on set, that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had so much better mental clarity. I felt healthier, I felt fitter.” Since that realization, Holland has stayed sober and couldn’t be happier to tell his story.
Simon Pegg
The World’s End star Simon Pegg recently opened up about hiding his alcoholism during movie sets in the past, including Mission Impossible III. “You become very sneaky when you have something like that [alcoholism] in your life,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, per The Hollywood Reporter.
“You learn how to do it without anyone noticing because it takes over. It wants to sustain itself and it will do everything it can to not be stopped,” he said on the radio program. “But eventually it just gets to a point when it can’t be hidden, and that’s when, thankfully, I was able to pull out of the dive.” According to Pegg, he began his recovery in 2009 after the birth of his daughter.
Tom Sandoval
Amidst the ongoing so-called “Scandoval” drama, Vanderpump Rules star Tom Sandoval announced he’s sober. “It’s been one month since I’ve had my last drink of alcohol,” he said in a video obtained by TMZ. “I’m just taking a little break for a second.”
Alexander Ludwig
Vikings star Alexander Ludwig recently opened up for the first time on Instagram about his struggles with addiction on the 5th anniversary of his sobriety. “It’s pretty crazy to me that five years ago to the day, I was so lost, so confused and so scared about where my life would go,” he said. “All I knew was that I had an issue and a problem that needed to be fixed.”
The actor continued, “I’ve lost a lot of friends to this disease, so many people didn’t make it and I don’t really know why, because there’s so many reasons why that should have been me and not them. I don’t want to make this video as, like, congratulatory to myself — it’s really just for anybody that needs to see this.” May his story help others who might be going through the same thing.
Hayden Panettiere
Hayden Panettiere opened up to Women’s Health about the effects alcoholism had on her body, and how she recovered. “My body was like, ‘enough,'” she remembered. “I hit 30. My face was swollen. I had jaundice. My eyes were yellow. I had to go to a liver specialist. I was holding on to weight that wasn’t normally there. My hair was thin and coming out in clumps.”
Soon after, in 2021, she entered a treatment center and joined a 12-step program. “I did a lot of work on myself,” Panettiere said. “After eight months of intensive therapy, I felt like I had this blank canvas to work with.”
John Owen Lowe
Rob Lowe’s 28-year-old son John Owen recently shared his appreciation for his dad for helping him kick his addiction. “When I was struggling with addiction, he was always there for me,” he told People “I credit that with being one, if not the main, reason that I’m sober and living a healthy lifestyle.”
On the carpet for their new show, Unstable, John Owen continued to thank his dad, who’s also struggled with addiction in the past. “To be completely honest and serious about it, I’m eternally grateful to have supportive parents who were there for me in a moment when I needed help,” he told People.”And I know a lot of people don’t have that. And that makes me sad and also very grateful that I did, and I’ll forever be grateful for that.”
David Dastmalchian
Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania star David Dastmalchian recently spoke out about his struggles with drugs and alcohol before becoming an actor. “For nothing else, the endless pool of gratitude that I feel for the past two decades of this journey, living without drugs and alcohol, absolutely informs all the work that I do as an actor and think about the characters I want to bring to life,” he told Page Six. According to the outlet, the actor, which also stars in the upcoming movie Boston Strangler, once became homeless due to his heavy drug addiction for two years before his family helped him get sober.
David Hasselhoff
David Hasselhoff credits his daughters for saving his life from alcoholism. The actor got clean after his oldest daughter videotaped him while he was lying on a Las Vegas hotel room floor, trying to eat a cheeseburger.
“It is my responsibility to do the best I can and to take it one day at a time,” he told Mirror in 2015. “But alcohol can become deadly. The scariest is when you go into a meeting and you’re like, ‘Where’s Steve?’ and they say, ‘Oh, Steve died last night.'”
Jamie Lee Curtis
“I too found painkillers after a routine cosmetic surgical procedure and I too became addicted,” Jamie Lee Curtis wrote in a 2009 blog post for the Huffington Post. She also said her recovery was “the single greatest accomplishment” of her life.
Cara Delevingne
Model and actress Cara Delevingne recently up about being four months sober in a January interview with Vogue. “The games, the crazy performances, the escape rooms—I loved giving that to people,” she told the outlet. “They could come here and leave their stress and responsibilities behind, and maybe that sounds like Willy Wonka, but it was the idea that they could come and just be like kids, but in giving that to people, I was kind of stuck in myself.”
Scott Weiland
Former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland had a long drug-related rap sheet before he died of an accidental overdose in 2015.
"That's why I always had to do heroin with coke. Fuckin' do coke for a few hours straight until you're going out of your mind, the fucking demons are trying to smash through the mirror, and then after that, it's time to run down the hallway and get into the fucking bag as soon as you can, put that fuckin' needle in the arm and get that shit in you quick to… to slow the fuckin' world back down and close that fuckin' hole to the next dimension. Because once you open it, it's… you don't know what can come in," he told Rolling Stone in 2007.
Natalie Cole
Legendary singer Natalie Cole battled addiction in the 1990s, and in 2016, she died of heart failure caused by lung disease.
"There were other problems — exhaustion, the nodule on my throat, but also the drugs," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. "I was under the influence to the point… of not being able to function. The story is drugs — whether it's cocaine or alcohol — take control of your life. Everything is focused in that direction. You can't conduct business meetings correctly or even show up for them. Then, your self-respect is gone."
Betty Ford
During her tenure as first lady from 1974 to 1977, Betty Ford raised awareness for addiction and went public with her long-running battle with alcoholism.
In an interview with Barbara Walters in 1977, Ford spoke on the difficulty of admitting she was an alcoholic, saying, "The word 'alcoholic' to me had a feeling — a meaning of being disheveled, drunk — all of those things, so how could I be an alcoholic?"
In 1978, she went into rehab after her family staged an intervention and, in 1982, she founded the famous Betty Ford Center for the treatment of chemical dependency.
Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin struggled with alcohol and substance abuse for most of her adult life. She died of an accidental heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of 27.
“We would get together and do heroin in these people’s rooms and just kind of, not nod off or go to sleep, but have really nice, mellow conversations,” Joplin’s bandmate Sam Andrew said in the documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue.
Billie Holiday
Substance abuse cost Billie Holiday her successful jazz career and, ultimately, her life. The singer developed an addiction to alcohol and heroin after her mother died in 1945. She remained addicted for the rest of her life and died of alcohol and drug-related complications in 1959.
“Faults? Well, of course she drank too much,” her pianist Mal Waldron said. “She wouldn’t stop drinking and she never did really stick the dope habit. But Lady Day had an awful lot to forget.”
Jodie Sweetin
Full House and Fuller House star Jodie Sweetin calls her life "amazing" after overcoming an addiction to meth.
"I speak about my experience growing up in the entertainment business, what my life was like after, some of the struggles and things I went through and where my life is today," she said. "It's a story with a message of second chances and turning things around and being able to overcome some adversity."
Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy admitted in a 2001 behind-the-scenes DVD that he had become an alcoholic while working on Star Trek and ended up in rehab in the late '80s.
"The minute we finished the last shot I would have a drink. Then it became a series of drinks, little by little. Before I knew it I was drinking more and more because my addictive personality was taking over," he told The Telegraph in 2001.
Kali Uchis
Singer Kali Uchis announced her sobriety to fans on Feb 27. In the candid tweet, she wrote, “I been sober 10 months, I was drinking & smoking since 12 years old even got alcohol poisoning & almost died at 17 so it’s big for me, thank you.”
Lucy Hale
This Valentine’s Day, Pretty Little Liars alum Lucy Hale opened up for the first time about her sobriety. “Bear with me, this is an alternative Valentine’s Day post,” she wrote, alongside a picture of a purple cake with “1 year” written on top. “This is a post about self-love and about the greatest thing I’ve ever done. On January 2, 2023 I celebrated one year of sobriety.”
She continued, “While this journey has mostly been private, I felt compelled tonight to let anyone who is struggling know that you are not alone and you are loved.” What an incredible milestone!
Most recently, on Feb 23, Hale talked about her “powerful and painful, insightful, joyous, horrible journey” with sobriety and addiction. In the talk, she remembered the moment she decided to go sober, and why it worked this time around. “I said, ‘I deserve more out of this life. I have to try it a different way,’” she recalled, adding that it was the first time she was making the change for herself, not others.
Daryl Sabara
Spy Kids alum Daryl Sabra opened up about sobriety in a recent episode of wife Meghan Trainer’s Workin’ On It podcast. In the talk, the actor explained that his sobriety started after a conversation with his therapist. “She just said, ‘If you want to be on your A-game maybe consider full sobriety,'” he recalled. “I was like, ‘What the f***? Of course, I want to be on my A-game.'”
“Even though weed is not really bad for me right now, I don’t need to keep testing it out to wait to get bad or to get in a bad spot,” he added, noting that marijuana is his “crutch” and therefore had been “harder” to give up. Regardless of the obstacles he’s faced, Sabara revealed he is now “fully sober.”
Anthony Hopkins
In the spirit of starting a new year helping others, Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins shared a video to Instagram on Dec 29 where he talked about his struggles with addiction, gave some expert advice and shared he’s celebrating 47 years of sobriety.
“I just want to wish you a happy new year, and also to say I’m celebrating 47 years today of sobriety,” the actor began. “I am a recovering alcoholic, and to you out there, know that there are people struggling… Be kind to yourself, be proud of your life.”
The actor then went on to recall the “desperate situation” he was in 47 years ago in which he “probably” did not have “long to live.” He continued, adding that he then realized “there was something really wrong” with him before he knew what addiction even was. “It was a kind of mental, physical condition called alcoholism… addiction,” he said.
Drew Barrymore
Drew Barrymore was exposed to the Hollywood party scene at a very young age and entered rehab for cocaine addiction when she was 14.
“Once I really asked myself, ‘What are you angry with?’ I dropped the anger,” she told The Guardian in 2015. “If you search deep down in me, it’s like, why am I so angry, man? And it’s like, OK, ’cause my parents weren’t there, who gives a shit? Lots of people don’t have parents. They were gone, they couldn’t handle any of it, and I get it… My life was not normal. I was not a kid in school with normal circumstances. There was something very abnormal, and I needed some severe shift.”
Talking to People in 2022, the TV host talked about slipping back to alcohol abuse after her difficult divorce from Will Kopelman in 2016. “The drinking thing for me was a constant, like, ‘You cannot change. You are weak and incapable of doing what’s best for you. You keep thinking you will master this thing, and it’s getting the better of you,'” she said.
With time (and lots of therapy), Barrymore quit drinking. “It was my kids that made me feel like it’s game time,” she told the outlet, adding that creating her show, The Drew Barrymore Show, “gave me something to focus on and pour myself into. It gave us something to believe in.”
Tom Felton
Tom Felton opened up about his struggle with alcohol addiction in his new memoir called Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard. “Drinking becomes a habit at the best of times,” Felton wrote, per Entertainment Weekly. “When you’re drinking to escape a situation, even more so. The habit spilled out of the bar and, from time to time, on to set.” Felton’s recovery began after his friends, family and management staged an intervention and motivated him to enter rehab.
Julia Fox
Back in 2021, Uncut Gems star Julia Fox told the New Yorker about her heroin and pill addiction, explaining she stopped taking drugs after a close friend died of an overdose. She said, “After she died, I vowed, I’m never going to get high again, in her honor.”
Amber Valletta
Amber Valletta spoke to People about her previous cocaine and alcohol addictions, saying, “I am not a victim. My hope is that someone, somewhere in this room, out of this room will hear something that will help them and perhaps get them out of the shadows and the darkness of addiction and bring them into the light.”
Prince
Prince's death in 2016 was ruled an accidental overdose. He was rumored to have had an addiction to painkillers.
Jenelle Evans
Teen Mom star Jenelle Evans has been arrested for possessing heroin and marijuana and has admitted to spending hundreds of dollars a day on her addictions.
"I think my low point was with my drug issue and the whole heroin thing," Evans told E! News in July 2017. "I almost overdosed and died. I was trying to run away from my problems and then I almost overdosed. God knows what might have happened. I might have been dead."
Wendy Williams
Wendy Williams recently sat down with Entertainment Tonight to talk about her struggle with a cocaine addiction.
"I was a functioning addict," she shared. "I would report to work on time and I walked in and all of my coworkers, and including my bosses, would know but instead of firing me, you see, I would grab my headphones and arrogantly walk into the studio and dare them [to] fire me because I was making ratings."
While Williams didn't reveal how long she's been sober, she did say, "it's a miracle I was able to stop."
Mischa Barton
“We thought, ‘Work hard, play hard’… I was under enormous pressure,” Mischa Barton said to People about her past substance abuse addiction. “I’m stronger now.”
Edie Sedgwick
Model and Andy Warhol’s muse Edie Sedgwick passed away at the age of 28 due to her substance addiction, where before she died, she mixed a high amount of prescription barbiturates and alcohol.
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor suffered with addiction her whole life, going in and out of the Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, per New York Times.
Jane Lynch
“I felt sorry for people who weren’t alcoholics: I just loved AA,” Jane Lynch told the Guardian about her alcohol addiction and recovery. “It was very much a gift; it was almost like I was struck sober.”
Selma Blair
Selma Blair recently opened up to PEOPLE about her decades-long alcohol addiction, starting at only seven years old.
“I don’t know if I would’ve survived childhood without alcoholism. That’s why it’s such a problem for a lot of people. It really is a huge comfort, a huge relief in the beginning. Maybe even the first few years for me because I did start really young with that as a comfort, as my coping mechanism.”
Blair has been sober since 2016 and is releasing a memoir called Mean Baby that’s all about her past addiction.
Mean Baby by Selma Blair
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Anne Heche
Before her death in 2022, Anne Heche suffered an ongoing battle with her cocaine addiction.
Eva Mendes
After a 2008 trip to Utah’s Cirque Lodge rehab facility, Eva Mendes spoke with Interview magazine about how Hollywood actors are overly scrutinized, lambasting the idea that going to rehab is seen as a trope of a celebrity failure when seeking help is exactly the right thing to do.
“People have died, and I’ve lost friends too-even recently. So I can be a little sensitive on the subject,” she said of alcoholism. “Because celebrities’ lives are so visible, I think it makes it look lighter than it is. I have a really good sense of humor, I’m just very sensitive. The other day I was reading an article. I don’t even remember who the actress was, but she’s been around for a long time. She said something like, ‘I’m proud that I’ve had a whole career without making it to rehab.’ I thought, That’s such a negative twist on it. I’m proud of people who have the determination and the fearlessness to actually go and face their demons and get better.”
As for why exactly she went to Cirque Lodge, Mendes refused to make that information public: “There are so many lies out there regarding my recent trip to Cirque Lodge. But I don’t care what people think. I just don’t care. So I will neither confirm nor deny.”
Keith Urban
In his early years struggling to make it as a musician, Keith Urban started getting into drugs — especially cocaine and ecstasy, which he described as “my thing” in Rolling Stone in 2016.
“Shit started to really go awry. I stepped up my drinking. I started doing more drugs. Yeah, man. The whole back end of the Nineties were just awful,” he recounts. “I had plenty of stuff. I didn’t seem able to stop. There was no stopping this time. I’d go to sleep, wake up a couple of hours later, go at it again, drinking to take the edge off. I remember thinking, ‘I’m probably not going to make it until tomorrow.’ And then I thought, ‘Fuck it. I really don’t care. It’ll be a relief to not have to. I’ll take an Ambien and at some point I’ll pass.'”
He credits wife Nicole Kidman with finally helping him get sober for good, staging an intervention in 2006 after which he left for three months of inpatient rehab and has been committed to his sobriety ever since.
Braunwyn Windham-Burke
Real Housewives of Orange County star Braunwyn Windham-Burke revealed her struggle with alcoholism on the season 15 premiere of the show.
“Right before Real Housewives started filming last season, I had weaned my daughter Hazel and thought, You know what? I haven’t drunk in seven years. I’m fine. If I was an alcoholic, I couldn’t have done that,” Braunwyn told Glamour of her time on season 14. “That wasn’t the case. When I would watch the show, there were some scenes I had no recollection of, like my weaning party. Becca [a Bravo public relations executive] had to babysit me at BravoCon last year, taking tequila out of my hands. That wasn’t fair. I was putting the crew that I worked with and my family in really uncomfortable positions, and it got unmanageable quickly.”
Braunwyn thinks her alcoholism stayed manageable as long as it did because of all her pregnancies, during which she wasn’t drinking. But she says she’s never had a good relationship with drinking.
“I’ve never had a healthy relationship with alcohol, from the first sip I took at 14,” she admits. “When I drank, I drank until I blacked out or got sick.”
These days, Braunwyn is attending AA meetings and counting on her Bravo audience to hold her accountable.
Machine Gun Kelly
Machine Gun Kelly has struggled with substance abuse issues for years, but is only facing them now in face of a new hopeful chapter in his life, he tells Dave Franco in Interview.
“I think I watched myself believe that drugs were how you attained a level, or unlocked something in your brain, and I’ve seen the pros and cons of it,” he says. “Adderall was a huge thing for me for a long time. And I went from orally taking it to then snorting it, and then it became something where I was scared to ever go into a studio if I didn’t have something. I wouldn’t even step out unless there was a medicine man who was going to visit me and give me what I needed. And that’s where it becomes a problem.”
While Kelly still avidly enjoys marijuana, he’s taken big steps in recent weeks to figure out who he is without the drugs, and credits new girlfriend Megan Fox as an essential part of his support system.
“Currently, my drug of choice is happiness and commitment to the art, rather than commitment to a vice that I believed made the art,” he says. “I’m taking steps. I had my first therapy session last Thursday. That’s the first time I ever went, “Hey, I need to separate these two people,” which is Machine Gun Kelly and Colson Baker.”
Lana Del Rey
Lana Del Rey has been sober for just about all of her professional career, but she began struggling with alcohol as a young teen and was sent to a rehab program-slash-boarding school by her parents when she was 14.
“My parents were worried, I was worried. I knew it was a problem when I liked it more than I liked doing anything else,” she told British GQ. “I was a big drinker at the time. I would drink every day. I would drink alone. I thought the whole concept was so f***ing cool. A great deal of what I wrote on Born To Die is about these wilderness years. A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York. And when I write about the thing that I’ve lost I feel like I’m writing about alcohol because that was the first love of my life.”
“I was like, I’m fed. I am totally fed,” she added. “Like, at first it’s fine and you think you have a dark side — it’s exciting — and then you realise the dark side wins every time if you decide to indulge in it. It’s also a completely different way of living when you know that, it’s like being a different species of person. It was horrific. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
From age 18 on, Del Rey has been committed to a sober lifestyle.
Ben Higgins
Former Bachelor Ben Higgins opened up about his past struggles with addiction in memoir Alone in Plain Sight. an experience he never touched on during his tenure on the reality show. After a high school knee injury that resulted in surgery and first introduced Higgins to prescription painkillers, the reality star suffered a series of personal losses and became dependent on the pills.
“It’s not uncommon, like, people we know are struggling with this,” he told People of coming forward about it now. “I know what it’s like to be in that world and to be thinking about one thing and one thing only and trying to figure out, you know, where your next pill is. And that in itself is super isolating. It definitely doesn’t make you the best version of yourself.”
Kanye West
Kanye West bravely opens up about his struggles with alcohol and says he now takes it one day at a time.
“I haven’t had a drink since I realized I needed to take it day by day, but I never owned up, or was even told, ‘Hey, you’re a functioning alcoholic,’ West said in a new interview with GQ. “People have called me a crazy person, people have called me everything—but not a functioning alcoholic. And I would be drinking orange juice and Grey Goose in the morning.”
Ben Affleck
Ben Affleck went to rehab in 2001 to combat his drinking issues, but he reportedly still battles alcohol and gambling addictions.
“I just wanted to stop,” he told a reporter in 1998. “I started regretting some things I did when I was drunk. It’s funny to be obnoxious or out of control, but then it’s like, ‘I think I hurt that person’s feelings,’ ‘I made a fool of myself’ or ‘I didn’t want to kiss that girl.’ I have almost no inhibitions, so it’s dangerous for me.”
Travis Barker
Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker survived a 2008 plane crash that killed everyone on board except for him and one passenger, including his two close friends Chris Baker and Charles “Che” Still (a third friend Adam Goldstein, the only other survivor, died of a drug overdose the following year). In the aftermath, he spent three months in the hospital having 26 different surgeries performed on him in addition to multiple skin grafts. Barker has recently begun to open up about the shattering effects of that crash on his own psyche — the PTSD he suffers from, the depression that engulfed him throughout recovery, and the fact that it severed the severe addiction to opioids from which he’d been suffering at the time.
“People are always like, ‘Did you go to rehab?'” Barker tells Men’s Health. “And I [say], ‘No, I was in a plane crash.’ That was my rehab. Lose three of your friends and almost die? That was my wake-up call. If I wasn’t in a crash, I would have probably never quit.”
Stacey Dash
Clueless star and controversial political figure Stacey Dash revealed her struggle with addiction during an episode of The Dr. Oz Show. According to Entertainment Tonight, Dash revealed on the episode that she was taking “18 to 20 pills a day” and that she practically “lost everything” due to her Vicodin addiction.
Clara McGregor
Ewan McGregor’s daughter, Clara, vulnerably opened up about her struggles with addiciton in an interview with the Evening Standard. “Around four years ago my family and my partner Jimmy spotted that things were getting out of hand,” she told the outlet. “They told me ‘you’re just not yourself anymore’. When I was on Xanax I had no energy and I would start forgetting things.” McGregor credits her family for helping her overcome her addiction and cope with anxiety.
“Anxiety is suffocating. I’m 25 now and I’ve spent a lot of time working on it with therapy but it’s only in the last three to four years that I feel less constricted by it. My sister Esther and my mum are a great help.”
Jennifer Coolidge
In a Feb. 2022 InStyle profile, The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge opened up about the drug abuse she struggled with in her early 20s while she was living in New York City.
“Palladium, Limelight, Area, Save the Robots, all those clubs. I was going nowhere fast,” she shared with the outlet, specifying cocaine as her drug of choice because: “I was born low-energy. So there was this drug that was invented for people like me. It made me very alive, you know? Unfortunately, it’s a terrible drug.”
Coolidge had multiple emergency room trips as a result of her cocaine use, and ultimately checked herself into rehab and embarked on a path of sobriety at age 27.
Jessica Simpson
Jessica Simpson has been sober since 2017, a journey she undertook after years of struggling with alcohol and substance abuse. In her 2020 memoir Open Book, Simpson talks about overcoming her addiction struggles and finally starting to heal from childhood trauma.
“I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills,” Simpson writes frankly. In 2017, she told her friends: “I need to stop. Something’s got to stop. And if it’s the alcohol that’s doing this, and making things worse, then I quit.”
Demi Moore
Demi Moore has struggled with addiction off and on for decades, and saw her parents struggle with substance abuse from a young age. The star has gone to rehab several times, once in the ’80s and again in 2012, and she opened up about her struggles in 2019 memoir Inside Out.
Talking about the first time she got sober, when she was cast in 1985 hit St. Elmo’s Fire, Moore says this: “If I had needed to do it just for myself, I didn’t value myself enough. But the fact that they stood by me, still allowed me to step in to do the film was truly divine intervention that gave me something that meant more to me, which was to do the film, and allowed me to start to begin to find some value for myself.”
Brad Pitt
In 2016, Pitt split with Angelina Jolie, going down in a blaze with a reported fight on a private plane about Pitt’s drinking. After that, Pitt had enough. As he put it, “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges.” The breakup marked the beginning of Pitt’s time in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Pitt detailed his experience with AA with a touch of wonder. “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” he said. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”
Dax Shepard
Actor Dax Shepard talked famously about his addiction struggle to Playboy in 2012: “I just loved to get fucked up—drinking, cocaine, opiates, marijuana, diet pills, pain pills, everything. Mostly my love was Jack Daniel’s and cocaine.”
On a March 2019 episode of his podcast, Armchair Expert, Shepard talks about how his recovery is an ongoing process: “You’ve got to acknowledge you are an addict every day, first thing, right when you wake up,” he tells guest Gwyneth Paltrow. “I wrote a page in my journal every single morning because I had this thought that if I can’t commit 20 minutes to remember I’m an addict each morning, I’m going to end up blowing nine hours a day as an addict. I have to be able to say, minimally this is your commitment.”
Demi Lovato
Singer Demi Lovato has openly struggled with addiction since 2010, when she first entered rehab at the age of 18. At various points, the Disney star has returned to rehab facilities to treat an eating disorder, self-harm, and cocaine addiction.
After an August 2018 hospitalization for a drug overdose, Lovato released the following statement on Instagram: “What I’ve learned is that this illness is not something that disappears or fades with time. It is something I must continue to overcome and have not done yet.”
Lady Gaga
In Lady Gaga’s 2010 biography, Lady Gaga: Just Dance, the singer reveals past struggles with addiction: primarily cocaine, but dabbling in other substances as well.
“My cocaine soundtrack was always The Cure. I would lock myself in my room and listen to ‘Never Enough’ on repeat while I did bags and bags of cocaine. It was about being an artist,” Just Dance reads. “I wasn’t a lazy addict. I would make demo tapes and send them around. At the time I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me, until my friends said, ‘Are you doing this alone?’ Um, yes. Me and my mirror.”
Matthew Perry
Matthew Perry has been open about his struggles with alcoholism and Vicodin addiction at the height of his Friends fame. “It wasn’t my intention to have a problem with it,” he told People of the Vicodin he was prescribed for a jet ski accident. “But from the start I liked how it made me feel, and I wanted to get more…I was out of control and very unhealthy.”
“It was scary. I didn’t want to die,” Perry later told People. “But I’m grateful for how bad it got. It only made me more adamant about trying to get better.”
Colin Farrell
Colin Farrell checked himself into rehab in 2018 as a pre-emptive measure, after more than a decade struggling with addiction previously.
“For a long time I put the brakes on. For a long time. I could go mad for three, six months, and then I could pull back for a few months to try to re-enter the atmosphere. I couldn’t find the handbrake,” he told The Irish Independent.
Earlier, he reflected on how his addiction hurt those around him: “I have made plenty of mistakes in my life and I have hurt people in ways that have filled me with complete and utter shame…there are times in the past when I hurt people that I wish I could take back. And you can’t.”
Ewan McGregor
In 2005, Ewan McGregor opened up about his struggles with alcohol in Playboy magazine. “Originally I was a happy drunk. But later I was miserable because it’s a depressant…I was just ashamed of myself, really.”
“None of my directors ever said, ‘You know, I’d rather you didn’t drink at work.’ None of them. And they must have known,” he continued. “I was reeking of (alcohol)…I knew I was lucky, and somehow I knew that if I didn’t stop, everything would go tits up – my career, my family, my everything.”
Tim McGraw
In 2014, Tim McGraw talked to Men’s Health about his early years getting into trouble with alcohol and other substances. “Early in my career—I think I was 19—I was so shy that to even get up onstage in a club, I’d need a few drinks,” he said. “I remember my mom tellin’ me, ‘Y’know, if you don’t get up there a couple of times without doing that, it’s gonna be a problem.'”
“I drank too much,” he continued. “I partied too much. And did other things too much. Chemically. No needles or that kind of stuff, but . . . use your imagination.”
Tom Hardy
In 2018, Tom Hardy talked to Esquire about his struggles with addiction, which started at age 13. It wasn’t until 2003 that Hardy entered a twelve-step program, when he was 25 years old — and he’s been sober ever since.
“t was hard enough for me to say, ‘I’m an alcoholic,'” he told Esquire. “But staying stopped is f**king hard.”
John Stamos
John Stamos has been sober since 2015, after a devastating DUI that shook his world. In March 2019, he reflected on how Fuller House co-star Jodie Sweetin helped him through the process.
“It took me a long time, a long time disappointing everyone who cared about me, culminating in a terrible DUI where I could have killed somebody,” Stamos said. “I hit rock bottom. Jodie lovingly allowed me to walk my own path and when I finally humbled myself to ask for your help, I realized that the perky little blabbermouth had become the master of wisdom and was right by my side during some of the most difficult days of my life.”
Dennis Quaid
In 2018, Parent Trap star Dennis Quaid told The Sunday Times he was using up to two grams of cocaine per day in the ’80s. “I would do coke and I would use alcohol to come down…I liked coke. I liked it to go out.”
“I was lucky. I had one of those white-light experiences where I saw myself being dead and losing everything I had worked for my whole life.”
Sia
In September 2018, musician Sia posted a personal message to Twitter: “Eight years sober today. I love you, keep going. You can do it.”
Gerard Butler
In 2012, Gerard Butler talked to Men’s Journal about the decision to check into rehab after getting addicted to painkillers prescribed for an on-set injury in 2007.
“I started taking more…And I started taking them very quickly,” Butler said of the painkillers. “I was actually taking a minimal amount when I went in…It was more about becoming a mental warrior.”
That same year, he talked to Men’s Health about his time in treatment: “Maybe a stronger person wouldn’t have needed to go. When you hear the word rehab, you think, ‘He’s a mess, he’s f**ked up.’ But I’m glad I did it. I’ve made a shitload of wrong decisions in my life. But I know I’ve made some right ones as well.”
Rob Lowe
In 2015, Rob Lowe accepted the Spirit of Sobriety award for his 25 years of sobriety at The Brent Shapiro Foundation Summer Spectacular. “Everyone at some point has to come to terms with their own relationship with drugs and alcohol,” he told the crowd. “Being in recovery has given me everything of value that I have in my life…Integrity, honesty, fearlessness, faith, a relationship with God, and most of all gratitude.”
Lowe also shared the powerful role his family, especially his wife, had played in his recoery: “She inspired me to get sober. She’s put up with my defects of character as they call it. In sobriety the lessons keep coming if you’re lucky enough to be along as long as I have…She’s stood by through all of that.”
Lena Dunham
At a luncheon to benefit Friendly House treatment center, an addiction recovery facility for women, Lena Dunham opened up to Variety about her struggles with sobriety — specifically, her struggle with addiction to prescription anti-anxiety medication like Klonopin.
“Being sober in life is hard,” the Girls star admitted. “But being sober is the first step to facing all the things that made you want to hide in the first place.”
For Dunham, the road to accepting she had a problem was tricky: “I didn’t think that I was a drug addict,” she shared with the crowd. “I thought drug addicts were depraved lunatics who wandered the streets, demanding crack from innocent children and flaunting their open wounds in public parks. And I was a successful, capable celebrity who wandered red carpets demanding attention and flaunting her open boobs on TV. It’s totally different.”
Now, after a year and a half of sobriety, Dunham has a new lease on life: “Being me has sometimes hurt so much that I couldn’t bear it …But being me is also a super-power, and it’s the same for all of you … I’ll put my money on sober women any day — because a woman who has overcome an addiction can do f—ing anything.”
Alec Baldwin
Alec Baldwin abused drugs and alcohol throughout his 20s, and he told the New York Post he referred to the worst times of his addiction as the “Sixth Sense phase. When you’re dead but you don’t know it.”
“I’m driving down the road, I’m having a drink,” Baldwin recalled. “It’s 4 o’clock; I’m supposed to have a drink. But one day I went, ‘I don’t see anybody else in their car with a plastic takeout container filled with ice and wine. They’re drinking coffee, they’re drinking Diet Coke. They’re not drinking wine.'”
He sought treatment when he was 27.
Kelly Osbourne
Kelly Osbourne went to rehab three times before getting clean, and she admitted to People magazine that she was self-medicating daily with “whatever I could sniff or swallow to not be me.”
“I had my tonsils taken out, and they gave me liquid Vicodin,” she told People in 2009. “I found, when I take this, people like me. I’m having fun, I’m not getting picked on. It became a confidence thing.”
Lisa Marie Presley
The 51-year-old daughter of Elvis has opened up about her opioid addiction in a 2019 book on America’s opioid crisis. “I was recovering after the [2008] birth of my daughters, Vivienne and Finley, when a doctor prescribed me opioids for pain,” she shares. “It only took a short-term prescription of opioids in the hospital for me to feel the need to keep taking them.”
She credits her children with giving her the strength to get through recovery: “[I’m] grateful to be alive today,” she writes, “and to have four beautiful children who have given me a sense of purpose that has carried me through dark times.”
John Mayer
In a 2018 Complex interview, Mayer revealed he was two years sober. Here’s what informed his decision to quit drinking: “I have the most amazing last-night-of-my-life-drinking story. It was Drake’s 30th birthday party, and I made quite a fool of myself. It took me weeks to stop doing this every morning I woke up. And then I had a conversation with myself. I remember where I was. I was in my sixth day of the hangover. That’s how big the hangover was. I looked out the window and I went, ‘OK, John, what percentage of your potential would you like to have? Because if you say you’d like 60, and you’d like to spend the other 40 having fun, that’s fine. But what percentage of what is available to you would you like to make happen? There’s no wrong answer. What is it?’ I went, ‘100.’”
Cory Monteith
Glee fans thought Cory Monteith had overcome his addiction to heroin, but he died of an overdose of the drug in 2013.
Two years prior, in 2011, he opened up about his struggle with addiction to Parade, saying, “I really got to know myself through a lot of that self-destruction. I had to go very deep into myself and rebuild a lot of what I had taken apart, and that process is strengthening, that process is grounding. That doesn’t go away. That’s the foundation this is all built on now, and I feel stable. I feel happy. I like myself. I love my job. It just so happens that I fell into doing something that I enjoy — the drums and the music and acting and all that stuff. I love it. I love it a lot.”
Russell Brand
In a 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Times, actor Russell Brand gets real about his addiction struggles: “I hit rock bottom in 2003 with an addiction to heroin, which had cost me a job at MTV, a radio show, friends and girlfriends. I’d been doing drugs since age 19 and was a heroin addict for four years.”
Brand credits a 12-step program with helping him get clean: “Sharing your story with another addict, as I did in my recovery, proved vital. Nothing I said to this other person was too boring or terrible or trivial to him. He related to me — and the disconnectedness that I had always felt lifted. And so did the need to take drugs.”
Melanie Griffith
Melanie Griffith has been to rehab three times and once told an Australian magazine, via People, that she “did a lot of drinking and cocaine.”
“I’m lucky to be alive,” she said. “I was never as bad as some people I knew, shooting heroin and stuff. But I did do a lot of drinking and cocaine. I just thought I was having a good time.”
Griffith underwent treatment for substance abuse in both 1998 and 2000. She readmitted herself into a rehab facility in 2009 to “reinforce her commitment to stay healthy.”
Oprah Winfrey
The queen of all media admitted during a 1995 broadcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show that she was dependent on crack cocaine during her early career.
“Oprah made a spontaneous admission to mothers battling drug addiction that she had also used drugs,” said Deborah Johns, a spokeswoman for the show at the time. “Oprah’s words on the show are the best expression of how she feels.”
Lamar Odom
Lamar Odom’s battle with crack cocaine and alcohol cost him his marriage to Khloé Kardashian.
“I was hiding it for a while, but then I got frustrated and was like, fuck it,” he told Us Weekly in March 2017. “Around two years before we split up [in 2011], I was in the man cave she had made for me and she caught me. She was disappointed. So was I. The sad thing about it is, I don’t know if I was disappointed because I was actually doing the drug or because she caught me. She knew I was doing cocaine the whole time after that. It was my drug of choice. I’m not going to say she accepted it because that would be the wrong word. Tolerated would be a better word.”
Kim Richards
Real Housewife and former child star Kim Richards has very publicly battled issues with prescription medications.
“I know I’ve put a huge dent in the work that I’ve worked so hard to build over the past few years,” she told Dr. Phil in 2015. “I just want to do the right thing and I want to be the strongest I can be. I know that me sober, I can handle almost anything.”
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson reportedly struggled with addiction from around the age of 15, using LSD with castmates in his early theater days and ultimately developing a crack addiction that took him years to beat. He describes the story of how he got sober like this: “I guess I wanted to get caught. I ended up going to a party, drinking too much tequila and decided on the way home I needed to get cocaine and level myself out because I was drunk.”
Jackson passed out on the kitchen floor, where his wife and daughter found him. He went to rehab shortly thereafter, and says his true career began after he got sober: “For me, I have a direct correlation between getting sober and success because when I was in rehab, Spike Lee called (for 1991’s Jungle Fever),” Jackson recalls. “So as soon as that happened — when Jungle Fever happened — I started going to lunch in Hollywood.”
Dylan McDermott
As of August 2019, actor Dylan McDermott is celebrating 35 years of sobriety. He celebrated the milestone on Instagram, reflecting on his journey in the caption.
“Today is my Sober Birthday. 35 years! Staying sober has been my greatest accomplishment,” the Lucifer actor writes. “I say that because I was able to show up for myself in every way possible. In the most turbulent and best of times I had the rock of the 12 steps to guide me. I was able to be a father, son, brother and friend. Proud of this day because many in my family including my birth mother and father struggled with addiction. It was brutal to witness. I’ve also seen many who didn’t make it and that truly breaks my heart. If you’re hurting please get help.”
Britney Spears
After her infamous breakdown in 2007, Britney Spears’ ex-bodyguard testified in a child custody hearing that he witnessed Spears “completely strung out” more than once, according to People magazine.
Nowadays, Spears is clean and living life to the fullest.
Heath Ledger
Heath Ledger’s abuse of prescription medication led to his death in 2008. Toxicology reports said he died of acute intoxication from the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.
A statement released at the time said, “While no medications were taken in excess, we learned today the combination of doctor-prescribed drugs proved lethal for our boy. Heath’s accidental death serves as a caution to the hidden dangers of combining prescription medication, even at low dosage.”
Johnny Depp
Though many have speculated that Johnny Depp might be an alcoholic, the actor doesn’t “have the physical need for the drug alcohol,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013.
“No, it’s more my medication, my self-medication over the years just to calm the circus,” he said. “Once the circus kicks in, the festivities in the brain, it can be ruthless.”
Robin Williams
Robin Williams had a problem with alcohol and cocaine addiction in his early career and admittedly fought to stay sober the rest of his life.
“For that first week you lie to yourself, and tell yourself you can stop, and then your body kicks back and says, no, stop later,” he told The Guardian in 2010. “And then it took about three years, and finally you do stop.”
A toxicology report revealed that he was not under the influence of alcohol or any illicit drugs at the time of his death by suicide in 2014.
Eminem
Rapper Eminem told Rolling Stone in 2011 that he overdosed on prescription medication in 2009 and had been abusing Vicodin and Valium for years before entering rehab and cleaning up.
“I was taking so many pills that I wasn’t even taking them to get high anymore,” he said. “I was taking them to feel normal. Not that I didn’t get high. I just had to take a ridiculous amount. I want to say in a day I could consume anywhere from 40 to 60 Valium. And Vicodin… maybe 20, 30? I don’t know. I was taking a lot of shit.”
Stephanie Pratt
Stephanie Pratt, former star of The Hills, revealed in her new memoir Made in Reality that she started smoking crystal meth as a young teen and battled depression and an eating disorder on top of it.
“I was on the extreme level and addiction developed instantly,” she wrote. “[I smoked] probably four times before school, then at snack… probably 12 or 13 times a day. I didn’t care about anything. I could live or die, I didn’t care. I had nothing to get out of bed for, nothing was exciting.”
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Philip Seymour Hoffman battled to stay sober for years, but he died in 2014 of an acute mixed drug intoxication, including heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines and amphetamine, according to the New York Medical Examiner’s Office via CNN.
“From the beginning, Phil was very frank about his addictions,” widow Mimi O’Donnell wrote for Vogue in 2017. “He told me about his period of heavy drinking and experimenting with heroin in his early 20s, and his first rehab at 22. He was in therapy and AA, and most of his friends were in the program. Being sober and a recovering addict was, along with acting and directing, very much the focus of his life. But he was aware that just because he was clean didn’t mean the addiction had gone away.”
Kristin Davis
Kristin Davis intentionally gave up alcohol in her early 20s because she felt it had become a problem and was interfering with her career.
“To the outside world, I was a good girl,” she told The Guardian in 2002. “But I drank a lot, which was rebellious because my parents didn’t drink at all. In the South, pretty much everybody drinks. There was always lots of alcohol, lots of access to alcohol, people sitting around every night with a mint julep, or whatever.”
Amber Portwood
Amber Portwood opened up about her opiate addiction, saying that she was high during most of the filming of Teen Mom.
“I would stay up all day and all night taking drugs 24 hours, and then I would get so high that I’d forget that I took pills, and I’d take more,” she revealed on MTV’s Getting to Know You TV special in 2015. “A whole scrip would be gone in less than a week. That’s 180 opiates.”
Amy Winehouse
It’s no secret that Amy Winehouse privately battled substance abuse issues. In 2007, she was reportedly hospitalized for an overdose on heroin, ecstasy, ketamine and alcohol.
“Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression,” she told German magazine Stern in 2007.
It was determined that accidental alcohol poisoning caused her death in 2011.
Lindsay Lohan
Lindsay Lohan has entered rehab three times since 2010 to recover from alleged alcohol and cocaine abuse. She was also convicted twice of drunk driving and once for cocaine use, calling her arrests “totally irresponsible — a stupid mistake.””And from then on, the press were on me all the time,” Lohan said on Piers Morgan Live in 2013. “It was the first time I’d taken drugs. I was out in a club with people I shouldn’t have been with, and took cocaine, and got in the car. It was so stupid.”
Zac Efron
Zac Efron entered rehab in early 2013 for rumored alcohol and substance abuse.
“It’s a never-ending struggle,” the actor said of his issues with addiction, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “I was drinking a lot, way too much.”
Of his workload, he said, “I had done films back-to-back-to-back. I was burnt out.” The problem went deeper, too: “There was something lacking, some sort of hole that I couldn’t really fill up. I was just so deep into my work, it was really the only thing I had.”
Ethan Embry
Prompted by his six-year anniversary of getting clean and attorney general Jeff Sessions’ memo on drug charges and sentences, Ethan Embry took to Twitter to speak about opiate addiction.
“Opiate OD is the leading cause of preventable death in America at 50k last year alone. It’s a health crises not a criminal one Mr Sessions,” Embry tweeted in May 2017.
“For decades we have told addicts that their behavior deserves punishment. That they should be locked away for their addictions,” he continued. “All that accomplishes is multiplying the shame that us addicts experience. It forces us to hide our addictions until it’s too late for help. So many people have died because they were afraid and ashamed. This memo from Sessions does nothing to address that. It only makes it worse.”
Embry also invited anyone battling addiction to send him a direct message on Twitter, and he would offer any advice he could to help lessen the pain of withdrawal.
“I was stuck in a cycle of running through a subutex script and smoking tar for about two straight years. 6 years ago today I started my kick,” he tweeted. “If you are strung out on opiates and want to stop-but the fear of the kick is keeping you from it-I won’t lie it fucking sucks… But unlike the cycle you are in right now, there is an end in sight. Find someone you can trust to walk you through it and get tough.”
Fergie
While in the group Wild Orchid, Fergie developed an addiction to ecstasy, which then turned into an addiction to crystal meth. The singer has stated that quitting meth was the hardest thing she has ever done.
“I was [suffering from] chemically induced psychosis and dementia,” she told iNews in December 2017. “I was hallucinating on a daily basis. It took a year after getting off that drug for the chemicals in my brain to settle so that I stopped seeing things. I’d just be sitting there, seeing a random bee or bunny.”
Nicole Richie
Nicole Richie admits that she abused heroin and cocaine before becoming a mom and a successful businesswoman.
“At 18, I had just been doing a lot of cocaine,” she said on 20/20 in 2007. “I, again, made the decision for myself, this is something I have to do. I have to get off drugs. This isn’t the life… this was heroin.”
Daniel Radcliffe
Daniel Radcliffe said he voluntarily gave up alcohol in 2010 because he recognized his drinking had gotten “unhealthy and damaging,” according to The Guardian.
“I was living in constant fear of who I’d meet, what I might have said to them, what I might have done with them, so I’d stay in my apartment for days and drink alone,” he told ShortList magazine in 2012. “I was a recluse at 20. It was pathetic — it wasn’t me. I’m a fun, polite person, and it turned me into a rude bore.”
Charlie Sheen
After parting ways with Two and a Half Men, Sheen was reportedly spending $2,000 a day on cocaine, according to the Daily Mail.
“I woke up and decided, you know, I’ve been kicked around. I’ve been criticized. I’ve been like the ‘Ah, shucks’ guy with like this bitchin’ rock star life. And I’m just finally going to completely embrace it, wrap both arms around it, and love it violently. And defend it violently through violent hatred,” he told ABC News in 2011.
Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino
Jersey Shore star Mike Sorrentino ended up in rehab in 2012 to try to get a handle on his prescription medication, drugs and alcohol addictions, according to People.
“When I had gotten out of Jersey Shore, I had a year to settle down and find out who I was, and I wasn’t in the best shape,” Sorrentino said. “I had to rebuild myself inside and out.”
Steven Tyler
“I’m a drug addict and alcoholic and fighting it every day,” Steven Tyler told Billboard magazine in 2014, adding, “I express my joy all because of AA.”
Anna Nicole Smith
Larry Birkhead, the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter, testified that he witnessed the model abuse methadone before her death in 2007.
“She said she was trying to cut down on the amounts but if she didn’t take it, she could go into shock and she could possibly lose the baby,” Birkhead said, claiming that she took the drug while pregnant with her daughter.
Billy Joel
Billy Joel admitted to Howard Stern in 2014 that the song “Scandinavian Skies” is about doing heroin.
“This was back in the late ’70s, I think. We were in Amsterdam, and there was all this stuff going on, so I said, ‘Let me see what this is like,'” he said. “It got me so high I didn’t know how to deal with it. You just get way out, just go to another place, and you’re into the blues. All you want to hear is the blues. You start drooling, and you get sick.”
Elton John
Elton John admitted in 2012 that if he hadn’t kicked his cocaine habit in 1990, he believed he would be dead.
“By all rights I shouldn’t be here today,” he said at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. “I should be dead — 6 foot under in a wooden box. I should have contracted HIV in the 1980s and died in the 1990s, just like [Queen lead singer] Freddie Mercury, just like [actor] Rock Hudson. Every day I wonder, how did I survive?”
Ozzy Osbourne
Rocker Ozzy Osbourne has battled a decades-long addiction to drugs and alcohol, but he got serious about sobriety after relapsing again in 2013.
“It’s a rock and roll thing — you rock and you roll,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “You take the good with the bad. When I was a crazy fucker, I’m lucky she didn’t walk out. Now I’m coming on five years clean and sober, and I’ve realized what a fucking idiot I was.”
Peaches Geldof
Family and friends thought socialite Peaches Geldof had gotten clean when she died of a heroin overdose in 2014.
“In retrospect, I think she thought the children would close the gap. But that just does not work. Heroin is a drug where you’re trying to enforce something upon you that is greater than life. It’s horrible, you’re filling your body with something that killing you,” her father, Thomas Cohen, said in 2017.
Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston publicly battled a cocaine addiction for much of her career, and when the official coroner’s report showed that she had accidentally drowned in a bathtub in 2012, heart disease and cocaine use were listed as contributing factors.
In an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009, Houston admitted to taking drugs on a daily basis. “I had so much money and so much access to what I wanted,” she said. “I didn’t think about the singing part anymore. I was looking for my young womanhood.”
Mel Gibson
Mel Gibson has had his share of legal troubles due to alcohol abuse. He said in an interview with Diane Sawyer in 2004 that he was drinking five pints of beer for breakfast during the filming of Lethal Weapon 2.
“Sometimes I used to drive inebriated,” he said. “This is the height of careless stupidity, and when you think about that kind of insanity and that you — I look back at that now and I go, ‘What was I thinking?’ I was a wild boy and we grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, you know, wild times.”
Stephen King
Stephen King battled alcohol addiction, but he has been sober since his family staged an intervention in the late ’80s.
“When I look back, the thing that I remember is being at one of my son’s Little League games with a can of beer in a paper bag, and the coach coming over to me and saying, ‘If that’s an alcoholic beverage, you’re going to have to leave,'” he recalled to The Guardian in 2013. “That was where I said to myself, ‘That’s something I’ll never be able to tell anybody else. I’ll keep that one to myself.’ I drew on that memory.”
Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox admitted to Howard Stern in 2013 that he had turned to alcohol to help him cope with his 1991 diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The actor said he attended therapy to get clarity and no longer uses alcohol to self-medicate.
“I used to drink to party, but then I was drinking alone… every day,” he told Stern. “It was about a year of a knife fight in a closet, where I just didn’t have my tools to deal with it. But then after that I went to therapy, and it all started to get really clear to me.”
Bradley Cooper
In a new episode of the SmartLess podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes, Bradley Cooper opened up about the addiction struggles that haunted his 20s, particularly after his Alias role was reduced.
“I was so lost and I was addicted to cocaine — that was the other thing,” Cooper said. “I severed my Achilles tendon right after I got fired/quit Alias.”
The actor is grateful that his addiction struggles largely happened before his acting career took off in earnest, noting that his role in The Hangover didn’t happen until age 36: “I did have the benefit of that happening when I was 29…I got to go through all those things before fame even played into my existence on a daily level. So all that happened before any of that.”
Cooper credits Arnett for helping him have those difficult first few conversations about sobriety, and he’s since been a source of support in other friends’ sobriety journeys, like Brad Pitt.
Diana Ross
Diana Ross was admitted to a rehab facility in 2002, reportedly due to issues with alcohol and prescription drugs. She was arrested for DUI while she was still undergoing treatment.
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was a regular user of barbiturates and alcohol. Her death in 1962 was controversially ruled an accidental overdose.
“This must have been an accident,” her press agent Pat Newcomb said at the time. “Marilyn was in perfect physical condition and was feeling great. We had made plans for today. We were going to the movies this afternoon.”
Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey Jr. spent most of the ’90s in and out of jail because of his addiction to controlled substances, but he overcame his issues and became one of the greatest comeback stories of all time.
Talking alongside his wife Susan Downey at the An Afternoon With Robert Downey Jr. event at LA3C, the Iron Man star talked about the ultimatum his wife gave him at the beginning of their relationship that motivated his recovery.
“The clearest conversation I’ve ever had in my life,” he told the audience. “You know when someone is being so clear with you with something you go, ‘There is zero wiggle room here.'”
He then concluded, “Ultimatums work.”
“They only work if the person’s ready,” Susan said in return, to which he joked in a baby voice, “You make me ready.” We’re so glad these two found each other!
