Eminem's Addictions: I Was Taking Up To 90 Pills A Day

In Celebs by Jeffery

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"The Bigger The Crowd, The Bigger My Habit Got"

Eminem does not want another Encore. The rapper reveals in a new interview the drugged-up lows he went to while producing the critically-panned album, as well as the extreme measures he took to get back on top.

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Talking to GQ, Eminem says he began developing an addiction to prescription painkillers and sleep medication during the recording of 2004's Encore. The rapper says at one point he was taking up to 90 pills a day, including Valium, Vicodin, Ambien, and the anti-schizophrenia drug Seroquel.

"Five or six songs leaked from the original version of Encore," he says. "So I had to go in and make new songs to replace them. In my head I was pissed off: 'Oh well. Songs leaked. Fu** it. I'm just going to take a bunch of fu**ing pills and go in there and have a party with myself.' I'm sure the more pills I took, the goofier I got."

Eminem would eventually go to rehab. But for a celebrity of his stature, it was not an easyplace to be.

"Look," he says, "every addict in rehab feels like everyone's staring at them. With me? Everyone was staring at me. I could never be comfortable. There were people there that treated me normal. Then there were a bunch of fu**ing idiots who aren't even concentrating on their own sobriety because they're so worried about mine. They're stealing my hats, my books -- it was chaos. Everything was drama in there. And at the time, I didn't really want to get clean. Everybody else wanted me to. And anyone will tell you: If you're not ready, nothing is going to change you. Love, nothing."

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While he might not have been ready to get clean, there was one event that forced Eminem to seek out real treatment: in 2005 he almost died of an overdose.

"I came to in the hospital and I didn't know what the fu** happened," he says. "Tubes in me and sh*t, fu**in' needles in my arms. I didn't realize I had [overdosed]. I wanted my drugs -- get me the fu** outta there! I think I was clean for two weeks. I was trying so hard -- I was trying to do it for my kids -- but I just wasn't ready."

Eventually Slim Shady took his health seriously, went back to rehab and kicked his habit. But he still takes his addiction as a lesson into the recording studio.

"The thing sobriety has taught me the most," he says, "is the way I'm wired -- why my thought process is so different."

"I've realized that the way I am helps with the music. Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I've written a whole song in an hour. But sometimes it sucks, and I wish I was wired like a regular person and could go have a fu**in' drink. But that's the biggest thing about addiction: When you realize that you cannot -- for fu**sake, you can NOT -- fu** around with nothing ever again. I never understood when people would say it's a disease. Like, 'Stop it, . It's not a disease!' But I finally realized, Fu**, man -- it really is."

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