Rapper Eminem opens up about his drug addiction that nearly took his life. Read more on Eminem’s revealing interview with Vibe magazine below.
Eminem reveals his drug addiction, which included anywhere from 10 to 20 pills a day.
“It’s no secret I had a drug problem,” Eminem wrote. “If I was to give you a number of Vicodin I would actually take in a day? Anywhere between 10 to 20. Valium, Ambien, the numbers got so high I don’t even know what I was taking.”
Eminem went to rehab in 2005, but relapsed and nearly died from an overdose of blue pills a friend had given him.
“My doctor told me those mysterious new pills were methadone, which is used to wean heroin addicts off dope,” he says. “Had I known it was methadone, I probably wouldn’t have taken it. But as bad as I was back then, I can’t even say 100 percent for sure. My doctor told me the amount of methadone I’d taken was equivalent to shooting up four bags of heroin. Even when they told me I almost died, it didn’t click.”
After Eminem got the drugs out of his system, he then had a knee injury that required surgery, but because of his drug abuse, he was not prescribed any pain killers.
“I started looking around my house to see if I had a stash box of Vicodin,” he says. “I’m ransacking my house, finally find something in the basement, in a little napkin, seven and a half Vicodin — the big extra strength ones — and a few Valium.”
It was at this time Eminem realized he was an addict.
“It never once hit me that drug addiction runs in my family,” he says. “Now that I understand that I’m an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it.”
Now Eminem has been sober for a year and has a new album called “Relapse”, which comes out May 19. Eminem said, “I wanted to make an overall statement — I’m back. It was a slow process. You gotta remember I hadn’t recorded a song sober in seven years. So it took me awhile to even feel like I could record a song sober … I don’t know the last time I shot a video sober, without drinking or taking anything. It’s been years.”
Eminem also said, “I almost feel like a little kid again with rap. I wanna play around with different flows. If I don’t feel like it’s what I’m fully capable of, if there’s one weak line, I wanna change it. Rap was my drug. It used to get me high and then it stopped getting me high. Then I had to resort to other things to make me feel that … now rap’s getting me high again.”
