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  • Charlie Sheen On Sobriety: It Had To Be Done

    Charlie Sheen On Sobriety: It Had To Be Done

    “I made some changes to give myself a shot to do some cool things professionally. And I’m proud of finally being consistent. And reliable. And noble,” Sheen said.

    Charlie Sheen, who celebrated one year of sobriety in December after one of the most infamous public relapses in recent years, said that getting sober was a necessity. 

    Talking about his announcement of being one year sober, Sheen told Extra, “That was good, that was good, yes, indeed — had to be done, had to be done.” 

    Two weeks before Christmas, Sheen posted a picture of his one-year chip from Alcoholics Anonymous, adding a caption “so, THIS happened yesterday! a fabulous moment, in my renewed journey. #TotallyFocused.”

    He had formerly revealed that he had started drinking and abusing drugs after being diagnosed with HIV in 2012. However, he said that today he is in good health, physically, mentally and emotionally.  

    “I feel good,” he said. 

    Sheen was speaking at the California Strong Celebrity Softball Game, which was organized to help fund recovery efforts from natural disasters, including the fires in California. Sheen said that supporting his community in Malibu was important to him. 

    He said, “It’s where I grew up, been here since, jeez, 1970.”

    Sheen told Us Weekly, “I made some changes to give myself a shot to do some cool things professionally. And I’m proud of finally being consistent. And reliable. And noble.”

    Before his diagnosis of HIV, Sheen had been sober for 11 years, so he knows that long-term sobriety is possible, he said during an interview with Dr. Oz in 2016. 

    “There was a stretch where I didn’t drink for 11 years. No cocaine, no booze for 11 years. So I know that I have that in me,” he said, according to People.

    Despite his long-term sobriety, Sheen said that he didn’t have adequate healthy coping mechanisms to help him deal with his HIV diagnosis and the worries about what the disease would mean for his life. 

    “It was the only tool I had at the time, so I believed that would quell a lot of that angst. A lot of that fear. And it only made it worse,” he said. “It was to suffocate the anxiety and what my life was going to become with this condition and getting so numb I didn’t think about it.”

    Sheen’s father, Martin Sheen, who is in recovery from alcoholism, has spoken publicly about how hard it was to watch his son relapse, knowing there was nothing he could do to intervene. 

    “What he was going through, we were powerless to do much, except to pray for him and lift him up,” Martin Sheen said in 2015.

    However, he said that his experience with addiction has helped him to understand what his son was going through in active addiction. 

    “The best way to heal is to help healing someone else, and it takes one to know one, so you can appreciate what someone’s going through if you’ve gone there yourself,” Martin Sheen said. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • New York Times Apologizes For "Demonizing" Moms With Crack Addiction

    New York Times Apologizes For "Demonizing" Moms With Crack Addiction

    In their apology, the Times’ editorial board acknowledged the negative impact of their stigmatizing coverage of black mothers with crack addiction during the crack epidemic. 

    When Suzanne Sellers gave birth to her son in 1995, she tested positive for drugs, having become addicted to the crack cocaine that was an epidemic in poor black communities. Despite getting clean, Sellers was coerced into signing away her parental rights, she said. 

    “I had been sober for over two years at the time I was coerced to sign away my parental rights, despite numerous accomplishments and evidence of a rehabilitated life,” Sellers wrote in an opinion column for The New York Times. “Being black was used against me. Yet there were other factors that compounded the racism and unjust treatment, including my being a woman who was poor, with an unstable living situation, unmarried and, of course, a drug user.”

    Sellers was writing about her experience after being featured in an opinion piece in which the Times’ editorial board detailed the ways that the coverage of mothers addicted to cocaine —particularly crack cocaine — contributed to the erosion of a woman’s right to choose and stigmatized a generation of mostly black babies born to mothers who were using drugs.  

    “Americans were told on the nightly news that crack exposure in the womb destroyed the unique brain functions that distinguish human beings from animals — an observation that no one had ever connected to the chemically identical powdered form of the drug that affluent whites were shoveling up their noses,” the editorial board wrote. 

    “News organizations shoulder much of the blame for the moral panic that cast mothers with crack addictions as irretrievably depraved and the worst enemies of their children,” the board wrote. “The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and others further demonized black women ‘addicts’ by wrongly reporting that they were giving birth to a generation of neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies once they came of age.”

    Sellers said that the paper’s recognition of the dangers of this type of coverage was appreciated.  

    “I want to thank The New York Times for its apology for how it demonized mothers like me,” Sellers wrote. “The apology is welcomed, and it gives me hope.”

    Sellers called on society to do better today, especially in regards to dealing with mothers and children affected by opioid addiction. 

    “In 2019, no longer should weak science, poorly informed crusaders and racist attitudes continue to shape public policy,” she wrote. 

    “American citizens, including drug users, have rights. My rights were violated numerous times during my child welfare case, and my family was wrongfully torn apart. When families are wrongfully torn apart, the results are devastating. When the fundamental relationship of every human being — the relationship of a child with his or her mother — is severed, the effects can be irreversible.”

    Today, Sellers has resumed contact with both her children, who are now adults. She leads her own consulting firm and a nonprofit, Families Organizing for Child Welfare Justice, and is a homeowner with three master’s degrees.

    “I list my accomplishments not to ‘toot my own horn’ but to show that people can and do recover from drug addiction,” she wrote. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Artie Lange Admits To Using Cocaine Post-Rehab

    Artie Lange Admits To Using Cocaine Post-Rehab

    After being tested in court, Artie Lange revealed that he has relapsed but is currently 10 days clean.

    Troubled comedian Artie Lange has had a well-known and lengthy history with substance abuse. Lange has been very open about his struggles throughout his life, and while he celebrated “18 days clean” on social media last month, he’s now confessing that he’s used cocaine since leaving rehab.

    A year ago, Lange pleaded guilty to possessing 81 bags of heroin, and he received four years probation. (After sentencing, Lange tweeted, “4 yrs [sic] probation is a long time.”)

    On December 14, Lange tweeted, “Today in court they drug tested me. For the last decade or more they’d have found both Heroin and Cocaine. With the help of in my eyes a miracle legal medication called Suboxen [sic] I tested negative for Heroin. I haven’t used Heroin in 41 days. . . . That’s a prison that for now I’m out of. It’s also the reason I’m not in jail.” Yet he added, “10 days ago when I left rehab I had to touch the flame. I used Cocaine. . . .”

    Lange added that the cocaine “should’ve left my system. But a higher power wouldn’t let [it]. I’m a bad addict. I had to see if I could get high. It was awful.”

    While Lange tweeted that “the judge and prosecutor were unbelievably compassionate,” and “they wanna save my life,” he said they are also making him “apply for a very strict rehab type program called Drug Court.”

    As he’s realized before, Lange knows he’s got a long road ahead of him. “I have work to do. I feel now I can also stop Cocaine. But that’s arrogance and addiction. I’m accepting help. If I fail now I will go to jail. Jail is not for addicts. But I’d be giving them no choice. When I use illegal drugs I have to score them. That’s breaking the law.”

    As his tweetstorm started winding down, Lange grew even more serious and asked his fans to “pray for me. So no lies. I have 10 days clean . . . But know that though I made progress & got rid of Heroin I still have not hit a homerun. But guys I got on base. I moved ahead. I wanna help ppl . . . Hopefully I survive to help others . . . But I’m working on me too. It’s the only thing worth while now.”

     

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Dennis Quaid: "I Saw Myself Being Dead" During A Cocaine Binge

    Dennis Quaid: "I Saw Myself Being Dead" During A Cocaine Binge

    Dennis Quaid said in a recent interview that in the midst of his cocaine addiction he was doing two grams a day.

    Actor Dennis Quaid, who has said that he did cocaine almost daily during the ’80s, told The Sunday Times this week that during one binge he saw himself being dead, a frightening experience that led the star to put himself in rehab. 

    “I was doing about two grams a day,” Quaid said, according to People. “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.”

    That led Quaid to check into rehab, which he completed in 1990, before marrying actress Meg Ryan in 1991. The pair were married until 2001. 

    Quaid used to use cocaine and alcohol together. 

    “I would do coke and I would use alcohol to come down,” he said. “I liked coke. I liked it to go out.”

    Quaid said that when he stopped using he still experienced cravings for the drug, saying he “missed it for quite a while.” Earlier this year, Quaid said that getting sober was a challenge. 

    “A lot of it had to be learned,” he said during an interview with People magazine in March “And part of it is just where I come from, I guess. Sometimes your hopes get ahead of your dreams, so you can get disappointed that way. Adversity is the thing that teaches you how to handle that.”

    However, these days Quaid, 64, gets his high from working out regularly. 

    “I’ve always had a high metabolism. I get a high from exercising. I really do,” he said. “I think it does what all those antidepressants are supposed to do.”

    He has also taken up meditation, “which puts me into the present moment because that’s all there really is,” he said. “Because either you worry about the future or there’s something about the past, but if you’re in the present moment, then there’s no problem at all. I’m sitting here. I’m just fine.”

    Quaid said earlier this year that despite his past drug use and three public divorces, he’s content now. 

    “I’m most happy when I just kind of get out of my own way and let things happen,” he said. “I’m not the guy that’s living an enlightened experience all the time; I blow my top many times. In life we’re either forced, kicking and screaming, into change—or we learn to cope with it. But I really am at peace now.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Eric Clapton Committed To Sobriety After Son’s Death

    Eric Clapton Committed To Sobriety After Son’s Death

    Rather than returning to drugs and alcohol to cope with his son’s accidental death, Eric Clapton turned to songwriting. 

    Legendary singer and songwriter Eric Clapton was just three years sober when his son Conor fell from a window and died at the age of four. Despite that immense loss, Clapton was more committed to his sobriety than ever following Conor’s death, according to a new biography. 

    “He was trying to beat the alcoholism when his son was just a baby,” biographer Philip Norman recently wrote Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton, told Fox News. “He was fighting against it. But it was really the death of Conor that made him determined that he would never drink again.”

    Conor died in 1991 when he fell from the window of his mother’s 53rd-floor apartment in New York. Conor would regularly look out the window, pressing his face against the glass, but that day a cleaner had left the window open. Conor reportedly darted past the cleaner and fell out.

    At the time of Conor’s death, Clapton was on his way to pick up his son for a day at the zoo. 

    “He was enchanted by Conor,” Norman told Fox News. “He had become a companion. Not quite a baby, but more of a boy. Eric was waiting to take him out that day… Conor would normally run into the room and press his nose against the glass of the window. But it wasn’t there that day. He just went out. It was the most dreadful, horrible, unimaginable tragedy.”

    After Conor’s death, Clapton struggled with his loss, but maintained his focus on his sobriety, Norman said. Rather than returning to drugs and alcohol to cope, Clapton turned to songwriting. His ballad “Tears In Heaven” was written in the aftermath of Conor’s death. 

    “Eric first coped, strangely enough, by playing a song he had written when he was married to Pattie called ‘Wonderful Tonight,’” Norman said. “Which is very soft, almost like a lullaby… That was the initial thing that comforted him. Then he wrote a song about [his grief]. By a really cruel twist of fate, it became the most successful record he has ever released, ‘Tears in Heaven.’ That’s really how he got through it.”

    In 1992, the track won Grammys for “Record of the Year,” “Song of the Year” and “Best Pop Vocal Performance.” Despite its success, Clapton told the Associated Press in 2004 that he could no longer perform the song because it was too emotional for him. 

    Clapton’s daughter Ruth also helped him cope with his son’s death. 

    “Looking back on those years, I realize what a profound effect she had on my well-being,” Clapton wrote in his memoir. “Her presence in my life was absolutely vital to my recovery. In her, I had again found something real to be concerned about, and that was very instrumental in my becoming an active human being again.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Aaron Neville's Son Details Getting Sober, Helping Others

    Aaron Neville's Son Details Getting Sober, Helping Others

    “Keith [Richards] hated that I was smoking crack,” Neville recalled. “He’d look at me like, ‘What’s wrong with you? Get it together.’”

    Ivan Neville, the son of singer Aaron Neville, grew up with music in his blood in New Orleans. A prolific musician, Neville has played in Keith Richards’ band the X-Pensive Winos and The Spin Doctors. Sober for over 20 years, Neville is speaking out about his recovery as well as helping other musicians.

    According to the Miami Herald, Neville recently shared his journey to sobriety at Imagine Recovery, a treatment center in New Orleans. The event was sponsored by Send Me a Friend, an organization launched by guitarist Anders Obsorne to help other musicians in recovery.

    Neville said he first smoked a joint was when he was 11 and by the time he turned 18, he was regularly drinking and using drugs. Neville ended up playing on the Rolling Stones album Voodoo Lounge and even had a shot at joining the band. The Winos opened for the Stones at Giants Stadium, and if Neville played well, he could have landed a lucrative gig playing with Mick and Keith.

    Instead, he passed out backstage from drinking and abusing cocaine, and missed the gig.

    “It was a big blunder,” he confessed. “I blew it.” At the Imagine Recovery event, Neville shared a photograph that was taken backstage before he passed out. “I look green. So out of it.”

    Neville’s drug use even worried Keith Richards.

    “Keith hated that I was smoking crack,” Neville recalled. “He’d look at me like, ‘What’s wrong with you? Get it together.’”

    It took several rehab stints before Neville finally got clean at a program in Pasadena, CA. He checked in on August 14, 1998, did 28 days, and has been sober ever since.

    “I’ve never had nothing stronger than a Tylenol or Advil,” he says today. “It was what they call the Big Surrender.”

    Neville was afraid to re-enter the music business when he got sober, and it’s an issue that Send Me a Friend helps other artists with as well. (Send Me a Friend is a network of sober people that watch over musicians to keep them away from temptation when they play gigs.) Initially, Neville was scared he wouldn’t be creative without drugs and alcohol, a common fear for musicians in recovery.

    “After first getting sober, I was like, ‘How am I going to play? How am I going to be able to write songs?’ Then I got a clear mind and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s how you do it. I can think and feel (stuff). It’s all there. It’s always been there.’”

    And when Neville went on the road with The Spin Doctors, he mapped out where the 12-step meetings were on the tour itinerary.

    “I was prepared,” he says. “I knew the kind of situations I might be walking into.”

    Neville was helped in his sobriety by Harold Owens, the senior director of MusiCares. Owens and Neville then helped guide Anders Osborne when he was ready to get sober himself.

    As Osborne confessed, “In the last year or so of my use, I kept reaching out to people. When you’re coming down or you’re feeling really depressed, you isolate a lot, but you also throw out these little calls for help. Ivan was one of my calls pretty regularly….He took a couple of my calls while he was standing onstage. That shows you the dedication to helping each other that the program has.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Gary Busey Reflects On Cocaine Addiction, Becoming Sober

    Gary Busey Reflects On Cocaine Addiction, Becoming Sober

    Busey says he stopped using cocaine on May 3, 1995, and has been sober ever since.

    In addition to his busy and prolific career as an actor, Gary Busey has earned a reputation for philosophical aphorisms that he calls “Buseyisms” – words of wisdom drawn from the letters of a word that he said reveal a new definition in its “deeper, dimensional meaning.”

    The Academy Award nominee has compiled many of these life lessons in a new book, Buseyisms: Gary Busey’s Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth (itself a Buseyism, which stands for “Bible”). In addition to a wealth of Buseyisms, the new book also details the actor’s battle with cocaine addiction, which nearly ended his life before he gained clarity through a spiritual outlook.

    In a conversation with NBC News Digital’s Think page, Busey recalled how he became addicted to cocaine shortly after earning an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Buddy Holly Story.

    “A fellow who looked like a Beverly Hills cowboy showed up at my door,” he recalled. “He told me that he was going to be my manager, and he had a gift for me. It was a blue box from Tiffany’s and, in the box, was a rock of cocaine as big as a 50-cent piece, and thick, with my initials in it.”

    The dealer told Busey that the drug would help him be “more creative,” and as Busey recalled, “I got hooked bad.” His drug use led to an overdose, followed by an unpleasant realization: “What have I been doing? I’ve been dancing with the devil in a circle that’s very tight, and the devil always leads the dance.”

    According to Busey, he stopped using cocaine on May 3, 1995, and has been sober ever since.

    To summarize his 25 years of sobriety, Busey has an aphorism: “F-R-E-E-D-O-M stands for ‘facing real exciting energy, developing out of miracles.” Busey expounded on the notion by adding, “The best freedom you can have is knowing you’re a miracle. So, be yourself, and live in the harmony of what God gave you to be when you were born. Think on that; feel that about yourself. And you won’t need to abuse substances or alcohol or needles or pills.”

    Busey remains sanguine about the challenges of chasing sobriety. He freely admitted that those who follow his advice and give up their substance of choice may actually come to hate him for such a suggestion. “But that’s okay,” he noted. “Hate is an emotion that comes with growth.” But the payoff, he said, is worth the effort. “Everything you’ve done in your life, even though some of it was hard, is good, because you go through it to get better. And that’s why we’re on earth.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Wendy Williams Promotes Addiction Treatment With New Billboard

    Wendy Williams Promotes Addiction Treatment With New Billboard

    Williams, who has battled cocaine addiction in the past, recently launched a campaign geared toward addiction-recovery through her nonprofit.

    Talk show host and actress Wendy Williams has launched a Times Square billboard promoting her talk show and her non-profit organization that provides grants for drug education, prevention and rehabilitation programs. 

    Williams has previously talked openly about her substance use disorder, and aims to “bring light” to the fact that addiction “doesn’t have to be your demise,” she told Page Six. 

    Williams has a history of cocaine addiction. She says that her substance abuse affected her life, even while she was successful. 

    “I lost a little over 10 years of my life regarding substance abuse, but I’m now going into Season 10 [of The Wendy Williams Show],” she said. “I’m married, I have a great career and a flourishing business … it’s not that you fall down, it’s how you rise. And if you rise, then you reach back. This is a reach back.”

    Williams has said in the past that she was able to abuse drugs while in the spotlight because she was so good at her job. 

    “I was a functioning addict though,” she said. “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.”

    After her own experience with addiction and seeing her son take K2, or synthetic marijuana, Williams launched The Hunter Foundation to provide education and prevention programs. Earlier this year the foundation launched the Be Here campaign, which is focused on increasing access to treatment. 

    “We want to be here for the people who need us, and we want them to be here for the graduations, the first steps, the recitals, the laughs, the journeys and more,” the campaign’s website says. “Our goal is to support the treatment and recovery of those facing drug addiction, work towards creating lasting solutions through legislation and support innovative treatment.”

    Using statistics about the prevalence of addiction and overdose death rates, Williams’ organization insists “This is everyone’s problem.” 

    Williams hopes that by sharing her family’s experiences she can help others. 

    “I have seen addiction up-close,” she said. “As a mother, wife, daughter, and friend, I cannot stand by and do nothing while there are people struggling to overcome substance abuse. Life is too short and we need to come together to help others.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Could A Skin Graft Prevent Cocaine Abuse?

    Could A Skin Graft Prevent Cocaine Abuse?

    Researchers studied whether skin gene therapy could reduce cocaine-seeking behaviors.

    The drug addiction “epidemic” claims tens of thousands of lives each year in America, but until now there has been little talk of ways to immunize people against substance use disorder.

    However, in the future that may be possible, according to new research that found that skin grafting might be used to protect people from cocaine addiction. 

    “Adapting this approach for humans could be a promising way for blocking addiction,” Qingyao Kong, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, wrote for The Conversation. 

    Kong was part of a team of researchers that demonstrated that skin grafting could be used in mice to reduce cocaine-seeking behaviors and make the mice less susceptible to overdose when given large amounts of cocaine. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. 

    Humans naturally produce an enzyme called butyrylcholinesterase (BChE), which can break down cocaine into inactive, harmless components. BChE can be modified to metabolize cocaine even more rapidly than it naturally would, and has been identified as a possible treatment for cocaine addiction. However, it is tricky to deliver the active enzyme and keep it functioning. 

    To overcome this, Kong’s team tried using skin grafts to deliver the enzyme. 

    “So instead of giving the enzyme to the animals, we decided to engineer skin stem cells that carried the gene for the BChE enzyme,” Kong wrote. “This way the skin cells would be able to manufacture the enzyme themselves and supply the animal.”

    To trial the idea on mice, the team first used gene editing to incorporate BChE into skin stem cells from a mouse. 

    “These engineered skin cells produced consistent and high levels of the hBChE protein, which they then secreted,” Kong wrote. Then, the cells were used to grow skin tissue in a lab, which was then grafted onto mice. 

    “With the genetically engineered skin graft releasing hBChE into the blood stream of the host mice, we hypothesized that if the mouse consumed cocaine, the enzyme would rapidly chop up the drug before it could trigger the addictive pleasure response in the brain,” Kong wrote. 

    They were correct. Animals with the skin graft did not get the dopamine high when they dosed on cocaine, meaning they had no motivation to consume more. “Skin graft of the hBChE-cells efficiently blocks the cocaine-induced reward effect,” Kong explained. 

    In addition, it acted as an immunization against overdose. Half of the control mice exposed to large doses of cocaine died, but none of the mice with the graft did. 

    The team then tested whether human skin cells would also produce BChE after being modified, and found that they would. 

    “This suggests the concept of skin gene therapy may be effective for treating cocaine abuse and overdose in humans in the future,” Kong wrote. In addition, other enzymes that target alcohol and nicotine could potentially be used, allowing the skin graft technique to treat individuals with those addictions. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Drew Barrymore Talks Past Drug Use: Cocaine Is My Worst Nightmare

    Drew Barrymore Talks Past Drug Use: Cocaine Is My Worst Nightmare

    The “Santa Clarita Diet” actress got candid about her past drug use on Norm Macdonald’s new Netflix talk show.

    Drew Barrymore’s past struggles with substance misuse are well-known. After she became a superstar with the success of E.T., she followed the path of many child stars, battling addiction which threatened to end her career.

    Now in a recent appearance on Norm Macdonald’s new talk show Norm Macdonald has a Show, Barrymore says she has no desire to go back to those days.

    When Macdonald asked Barrymore if she missed cocaine, she emphatically replied, “Oh, God. It’s been a very long time, but no. Nothing would make me have a panic attack and seem like a bigger nightmare.”

    Looking back in hindsight, Barrymore said her early fame was “like a recipe for disaster. You know what’s exciting? I got my s— over with at, like 14. Like, midlife crisis, institutionalized, blacklisted, no family. Got it done. And then [I] got into the cycle of being my own parent. It’s sad that there’s this weird alchemy about kids doing this line of work that f— all of them up, and I’m no different.”

    Barrymore admitted she still drinks, telling Macdonald, “I enjoy my life and get out of my own head. It’s not that I’m this militant person of clarity and presence but [cocaine] is like my worst nightmare right now.”

    Substance abuse ran in Barrymore’s family. Her father battled alcoholism and eventually wound up homeless. Her grandfather was Hollywood legend—and legendary drinker—John Barrymore. Drew had already taken a trip to rehab by the age of 12, survived a suicide attempt, and was then institutionalized for 18 months.

    She described her lowest point to The Guardian. “Just knowing that I really was alone… My mom locked me up in an institution. But it did give an amazing discipline. It was like serious recruitment training and boot camp, and it was horrible and dark and very long-lived, a year and a half, but I needed it.”

    Barrymore told Howard Stern in a past interview, “It was a very severe, locked down, no-Hollywood-rehab-30-day-Malibu-beachside-bullshit [place]… They saved my life.”

    After getting back into civilization, Barrymore lived with David Crosby, who was also in recovery, for two months, then worked a number of jobs before she rebuilt her acting career. She’s currently starring in the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet.

    View the original article at thefix.com