The Hollywood star Jamie Lee Curtis took to Instagram this week to open up about being sober for 22 years.
“A LONG time ago… In a galaxy far, far away… I was a young STAR at WAR with herself. I didn’t know it then. I chased everything. I kept it hidden. I was a sick as my secrets,” Curtis wrote in the caption. “With God’s grace and the support of MANY people who could relate to all the ‘feelings’ and a couple of sober angels…I’ve been able to stay sober, one day at a time, for 22 years. I was a high bottom, pun kind of intended, so the rare photo of me proudly drinking in a photo op is very useful to help me remember. To all those struggling and those who are on the path…MY HAND IN YOURS.”
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Curtis previously opened up to People Magazine about her addiction to pills, saying that it started when she was first prescribed opiates in 1989 after minor plastic surgery “for my hereditary puffy eyes.” Over the next ten years, Curtis said she would get painkillers any way she could, even stealing pills from her own family members.
“I was ahead of the curve of the opiate epidemic,” Curtis said. “I had a 10-year run, stealing, conniving. No one knew. No one.”
Curtis said that she even did drugs with her father, the late actor Tony Curtis.
“But I shared drugs with my dad,” she told Variety in 2019. “I did cocaine and freebased once with my dad. But that was the only time I did that, and I did that with him. He did end up getting sober for a short period of time and was very active in recovery for about three years. It didn’t last that long. But he found recovery for a minute.”
Curtis went to her first recovery meeting in February of 1999, and she told her husband Christopher Guest about her addiction the next day. She has been sober ever since.
“I’m breaking the cycle that has basically destroyed the lives of generations in my family,” Curtis said. “Getting sober remains my single greatest accomplishment… bigger than my husband, bigger than both of my children and bigger than any work, success, failure. Anything.”
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