I’d go from doing Mork and Mindy and then coming to do The Comedy Store and then go to The Improv. Then you’d go hang out at clubs and then end up in the hills at some coke dealer’s house. (knock knock) “Angel, it’s Robin.” You haven’t gone to sleep. You’re like a vampire in a day pass.
If you’re famous, most of the time, you get it for free, which is weird. It’s like the same thing when you get gift baskets at award shows going, “I don’t need this stuff, thank you,” but my coke dealers would go, “Here, dude! It’s part of our advertising campaign. I got Robin loaded.” It’s part of the whole thing of a little dust for you and then you’ll spread the word to other celebrities and eventually, if they get busted, then they could subpoena you.
KEVIN HART—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
My dad was on drugs when I was a kid. As I got successful he cleaned up. Smart. Smart move by this man. Very smart. When I was a kid he was just in and out of rehab.
My dad was cocaine. My dad was heroin. Weed. That’s probably it.
My mom kicked him out when I was young, but he was still in our lives. He was in and out of jail. My dad was a rebel. I love him for it, though. I know what not to do because of what my dad did.
As I got older, me and my brother figured out we got to help Dad. We put him in rehab, it didn’t go, he came out, and I think the disappointment on your sons’ faces as we look at you, is enough to make you feel like you need to get your shit together. I think that’s what did it. You can put a person in all the help you want, at the end of the day if they don’t mentally want to do it, they’re not going to do it.
For us, it was saying, “You know what, Dad? Do you. Live your life. We can’t change you.” He had the realization on his own. I’m glad, honestly, that he went through what he did. I don’t have a drug itch in my body. I will never touch drugs. Just because of what I saw, but if you take him out of my life, who knows? With all this money I’ll fucking be snorting up piles of cocaine. Who knows what I would be doing? I wouldn’t know why it was bad or why not to mess with it. Now I have a visual reality of what it could do.
JOHN DARNIELLE—MUSICIAN, WRITER
Speed was my thing for a while. There’s very little that wasn’t my thing at some point or another, but speed in ’85, ’86. Back when it was made in bathtubs and back when you would split a quarter into two-eighths and just slam it one at a time. When it became clear that you could get AIDS and die from that, your first AIDS test was remarkably terrifying. That week-long wait that you used to have. Everybody you were going to have to apologize to, everybody you were going to have to call up and go, “I killed you.” The terror.
ARTIE LANGE
I was taking fifty pills a day. I went to this one club and I was in full-blown withdrawal when I got there. There were three sold-out shows. I was sweating bad. The manager was like, “What do I gotta do to get you onstage? I need to get you onstage.”
“Can you get me a hundred Percocet?”
He says, “I can. How many are you taking a day?”
“Maybe like thirty.”
He says, out loud, “You should try heroin. It’s better for your liver.”
And I said, “Thank you, Doctor.”
He got me the Percocet to get me through the show. But then at the end of the night he had four bags of heroin. And it was brown. It was good. He says, “Just snort it.”
I go back to my hotel. I did three lines of it. Liberal, generous lines. I put on the TV and there was some movie on. And when my head hit the pillow I said out loud—knowing me—I said out loud, “I’m in trouble.”
It was euphoria like I never felt before, going through me. My head hit that pillow, and you know how I could tell heroin’s great? People ask, “Why is heroin addictive?” This is my answer: the movie that was on was Alex & Emma with Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson, and I never turned it off.
AMAZING JOHNATHAN—COMEDIAN, MAGICIAN
I did a lot of cocaine. I did a lot of it. For a long time. I wasn’t one of the guys who quit after John Belushi’s party. That’s when everybody quit, around that year. Everyone thought, “This is serious. This could kill you.” No, I kept going man. That didn’t faze me at all. I ended up smoking it. You know what got me off of it? Speed. I couldn’t get coke one night, so speed was the only thing left to do. I actually smoked that too. I smoked it like a fiend and I would go in my garage and I would write and write and write.
Then it stopped. I stopped being creative on it and it was like, now I was a normal guy with a habit.
ARTIE LANGE
The thing about heroin to me was you didn’t forget your problems. You remembered them but you didn’t give a fuck about them. It was great. It was like, “Fuck you, I don’t care.” Again, the same thing with coke. I finally said, “I can control this. It’s all right.” First six months, my tolerance wasn’t up and it was great. I was able to get a contact that kept me supplied.
My tolerance got built up after six months and then I was like, “Oh my God, I’m not getting high anymore.” I couldn’t stop withdrawals. Then I started missing shit. Showing up to shit looking bad. Trips on the road were hell because I’m like, “I got to find a contact in Pittsburgh, otherwise I’ll die in Pittsburgh from withdrawals or something.”
I hired guys to keep me away from drugs and one guy was my security who was getting me drugs. It’s all you think about. Fuck pussy, money, a career, friendships, and family. All you think about is the next fucking hit. And avoiding the withdrawals because it’s the worst flu times a million.
NATASHA LYONNE—ACTOR
So many people struggle to stick with sobriety. It is not for the faint of heart.
If you are really going to do it. If you are as low-bottom of a case as I was, which was like a real sort of I-hope-to-die junkie, then I wish you good luck and godspeed. I had someone describe it to me as not only do you have to smash down the house, but you have to then take out the Indian burial ground underneath the foundation of the house and then begin to rebuild. That process to me is certainly why I think a lot of people twenty-eight days later can’t really hack it because it’s not a twenty-eight-day scene.