Rap legend Eminem is opening up like never before, revealing that a near-fatal overdose nearly cost him his life — and became the turning point that pushed him to finally get sober.
The 52-year-old rapper, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, recalled waking up in a hospital bed after the overdose, completely disoriented and hooked up to tubes. His condition was so severe that his longtime manager, Paul Rosenberg, feared he had suffered permanent brain damage. At one point, it wasn’t clear if Eminem would ever walk, talk, or rap again.
“I got into this vicious cycle of, ‘I’m depressed so I need more pills,’” Eminem shares in Stans, a new documentary. “Then your tolerance gets so high that you end up overdosing. I woke up in the hospital and I didn’t know what happened. I had tubes in me and s**t and I couldn’t get up. I wanted to move.”
By the time of the overdose, Eminem had been battling prescription pill addiction for years, abusing Vicodin, Valium, Ambien, and Xanax — sometimes taking up to 20 pills a day from the late 1990s until 2008.
What pushed him to finally change wasn’t just the near-death experience. He realized his addiction was robbing him of time with his kids, especially after missing a guitar recital for his daughter Hailie, now 29.
“I cried because it was like, ‘Oh my god, I missed that,’” Eminem admitted. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Do you want to f***ing miss this again? Do you want to miss everything? If you can’t do it for yourself, at least do it for them.’”
That was the moment he vowed to get clean — and he’s now been sober for 17 years.
But sobriety wasn’t easy. Eminem revealed he had to relearn how to rap, admitting, “My writing had gotten terrible.” It wasn’t until working on his 2009 album Relapse that he felt his creativity return.
“Relapse turned the light on,” he said. “I realized I’m not embarrassed anymore about sobriety. I started treating sobriety like a superpower and took pride in the fact that I was able to quit.”