Big news for Eminem this weekend …
He just announced that Friday marked ten whole years of being clean and sober!
“Celebrated my 10 years yesterday,” he wrote on Instagram, along with a photo of his ten-year chip from his recovery program.
And really, isn’t this just amazing?
Eminem doesn’t do too many interviews, but in an old one from 2011, he explained just how bad things got before he was able to get clean.
Apparently his drug problem began back in 2002, when he was filming 8 Mile.
He said that the days were very long, and he was only able to sleep at certain times, so to help him out, someone gave him an Ambien.
He enjoyed it and got a prescription, and after building a tolerance, he slowly began taking more than he was supposed to take at a time.
“Then,” he said, “when I got off probation for my felonies and I didn’t have to drop urine anymore, the reins came off,” and when he went on tour in 2005, “I was f-cked up every night.”
After that, Em said that he felt like he needed to take pills to “feel normal,” and to get high he had to take “a ridiculous amount.”
“I want to say in a day I could consume anywhere from 40 to 60 Valium. And Vicodin … maybe 20, 30? I don’t know. I was taking a lot of sh-t.”
See what we mean about how amazing it is that he’s 10 years clean now?
But even though his addiction was clearly terrible then, things got even worse in 2006 when his friend and fellow rapper Proof was killed.
“I remember days I spent just f-cking taking pills and crying,” he recounted in the interview.
“It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people. I treated people around me sh-tty.”
In December of 2007, he overdosed on methadone — he’d begun taking it because he was told it was similar to Vicodin.
He doesn’t remember much about the overdose, but he recalled collapsing in his bathroom and then waking up in the hospital. Doctors told him that he was “about two hours from dying.”
After a week in the hospital, he went home, but he hadn’t fully detoxed. He said that he was very weak, and he somehow tore the cartilage in his knee and required surgery.
But since he still had the methadone in his system, he had a seizure and had to go back to the hospital for a third time.
Remarkably, after surviving all that, he relapsed again a few weeks after being released, and he said that’s when he knew that “I either get help, or I am going to die.”
And apparently, judging by his new Instagram post, he finally became clean on April 20th, 2008!
As you probably know, Eminem has many, many diehard fans, so he received a whole, whole bunch of support after sharing this milestone.
So many people congratulated him on his achievement, and others shared that he had inspired them to get clean as well.
A few people suggested that this chip proves that he’s a member of the Illuminati, because you know there’s always some of those fools out there.
To celebrate his anniversary — or maybe not to celebrate, but hey, it’s happening — Eminem will be performing tonight at Coachella.
If you’re out there and happen to see him, be sure to applaud him for this!
