Billy Idol recently revealed the unhinged way he quit heroin in a candid chat with Bill Maher.
On the March 2 episode of the Real Time With Bill Maher host’s Club Random podcast, Maher and the rock icon, both 70, found themselves on the topic of illicit drugs.
“Well, once you’re trying to get off heroin, what do you go to? You go to something else,” Idol explained.
That’s when he admitted the unconventional route he took in kicking his habit, telling Maher, “I started smoking crack to get off heroin. It worked.”
“There you go, kids,” Maher quipped with a laugh. “Want to get off heroin? Step up to crack!”
“This is probably the worst advert,” Idol acknowledged before reiterating, “But it worked. I got off the heroin.”
Through the years, Idol has opened up a bit about overcoming his past drug addiction. In the documentary, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, the “White Wedding” singer recalled a near-fatal overdose in 1984.
“I was coming back in triumph, and I nearly ruined it,” Idol recounted, per People. “We flew to London, where we met a load of our pals that we knew. They had some of the strongest heroin. Everybody did a line or so, and they all nodded out except for me and this mate of mine.”
“I was basically dying. I was turning blue,” he continued. “So, they put me in an ice cold bath, and I remember them walking me around on the top of the building, on the roof.”
A huge shift in Idol’s habits came after a 1990 motorcycle accident, after which he nearly lost a leg.
“It took a long time, but gradually I did achieve some sort of discipline where I’m not really the same kind of guy I was in the ’80s,” he told People in a May 2024 interview. “I’m not the same drug addicted person.”
Idol pointed out that he is “really lucky” to have kicked his addictions. Today, he said he is “California sober.”
“I can have a glass of wine every now and again,” he explained. “I don’t have to do nothing. But at the same time, I’m not the drug addict that I was in the peak ’70s, ’80s.”
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