In the latest issue of Vibe magazine,
Eminem opens up about the serious addiction he had with prescription pills. In the article, he reveals he was taking dozens of painkillers each day.
The magazine released excerpts from the interview, including this shocking revelation Eminem told them: “It’s no secret I had a drug problem. 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.”
He also said, “My doctor told me those mysterious new pills were methadone, which is used to wean heroin addicts off dope. 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.”
He then says that he turned to drugs a second time after suffering a knee injury. He says he wasn’t given painkillers because of his previous problem with drugs, and that led him to another relapse.
He told the mag, “I started looking around my house to see if I had a stash box of Vicodin. I’m ransacking my house, finally found something in the basement, in a little napkin, seven and a half Vicodin — the big extra strength ones — and a few Valium.”
He says he never realized that drug abuse ran in his family. His mother was also a drug addict, and Eminem says his problems with drugs gave him a new understanding of his mother.
But now, at 36 years old, Eminem is clean, and back in the rap game. He says he struggled to write songs for his current album
Relapse because he never had to write songs when he was sober.
He says, “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.”
We’re glad he’s back in the game! Love him or hate him, Eminem is a talented artist, and we hope that this time, his sobriety sticks.
