“I’m about to take a big step to help myself, to save my life. I’m sure you will hear about it. I feel like I’m not done. I have another run of laughing with you all.”
Comedian Artie Lange seems ready for a change.
Now 51 years old, his health fading, Lange appears ready to commit to sobriety. And it begins with a treatment program.
“I’m about to go into drug treatment and commit to a full rehab, in-patient,” he said in a recent interview on The Steve Trevelise Show. “I don’t know. I’m a very humble guy at this point. And I think I”m ready to go and do what I gotta do. It’s been long enough.”
With Kevin Meara walking him through the process, Lange is ready to receive help. This time he’s hoping it will stick. Meara is the co-chair of City of Angels, a Groveville, New Jersey-based organization that provides interventions, recovery support, counseling services and more at no cost.
Lange did not expect to live past 25, he said in a previous interview. He was 37 at the time fellow comedian Mitch Hedberg died at the same age of a drug overdose in 2005.
“When I heard [Mitch] died, I had such guilt and said to myself, ‘God, if I was a better person I would have just said, you know what, the heck with the Stern show, forget Caroline’s.’ I should have grabbed him and said, let’s go to the hospital right now. Let’s get detoxed and get better right now,” Lange said on The Steve Trevelise Show.
“But Mitch was the kind of guy who openly said—he was so far gone—[that] he goes, ‘Guys, don’t try to help me. I wanna do heroin ’til I die.’ And that’s a mindset that people get into because they’re so afraid of not being on it that you lose sense of reality. It just is so sad to think of that. And even that didn’t stop me.”
When Trevelise asked if Lange can see himself getting to this point, he replied, “I hope not. I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m even close to there yet.”
Lange, who said in a previous interview that his fading health is starting to worry him, does not want to end up like Hedberg or Greg Giraldo, another comedian who died of a drug overdose in 2010. He was 44 years old.
“I get nervous now, because now I wanna live. Now I do care about it, and I think that maybe I’ve done too much damage,” Lange said to NJ Advance Media in July.
The day after his recent interview on Nov. 5, Lange tweeted some uplifting words to his followers: “I’m about to take a big step to help myself, to save my life. I’m sure you will hear about it. I feel like I’m not done. I have another run of laughing with you all. I want to thank you fans the way you thank me. You have saved my life. You are special to me. Wish me luck.”
