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Tag: Dennis Quaid

  • 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

  • Dennis Quaid Revisits "White Light" Moment That Spurred His Recovery

    Dennis Quaid Revisits "White Light" Moment That Spurred His Recovery

    “I was basically doing cocaine pretty much on a daily basis during the ‘80s.”

    Since kicking off his acting career in the ’70s, former Hollywood “bad boy” Dennis Quaid has come out on the other side of cocaine addiction—“my greatest mistake.” Quaid, now 64, revisited the height of his cocaine use and the turning point that made him want to quit, during a recent interview.

    “I grew up in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and there was a completely different attitude about it then. Even in some movie budgets. I kept roaring on,” he told Megyn Kelly.

    “I was basically doing cocaine pretty much on a daily basis during the ‘80s. I spent many, many a night screaming at God to please take this away from me, I’ll never do it again because I’ve only got an hour before I have to be at work.”

    But by the afternoon, the young actor would change his mind, and the cycle would continue.

    By the time he was filming The Big Easy (1986), he’d sleep for just one hour a night. “Doing blow just contributed to me not being able to handle the fame, which, at the time, I guess I felt I didn’t deserve,” he wrote in a 2011 Newsweek essay. “I was doing my best imitation of an asshole there for a little while, trying to pretend everything was okay.

    “Meanwhile my life was falling apart, and I noticed myself, but I was hoping everyone else didn’t.”

    Quaid struggled to quit until the late ’80s, when he finally sought help. “I had a white light experience where I saw myself either dead or losing everything that meant anything to me,” he told Kelly.

    He provided more detail about his moment of clarity in his Newsweek essay: “I had a band then, called The Eclectics. One night we played a show at the China Club in LA, and the band broke up… because it all got too crazy. I had one of those white light experiences that night where I kind of realized I was going to be dead in five years if I didn’t change my ways. The next day I was in rehab.”

    But even after rehab, Quaid recalled that things got worse before they got better.

    “It was one of those times when you think, ‘Well, if I do the right thing and clean up my life, it’ll get better.’ No, it got worse! In 1990 I did Wilder Napalm, which came out and went down the tubes. But that time in my life—those years in the ‘90s recovering—actually chiseled me into a person. It gave me the resolve and a resilience to persevere in life,” he wrote. “If I hadn’t gone through that period, I don’t know if I’d still be acting. In the end, it taught me humility. I really learn to appreciate what I have in this life.”

    View the original article at thefix.com