Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis has opened up about her secret 10-year opiate addiction.
The actress feels she’s lucky to be alive after spending the late 1980s and much of the 1990s popping pills behind everyone’s back.
“I was ahead of the curve of the opiate epidemic,” the 59 year old tells People. “I had a 10-year run, stealing, conniving. No one knew. No one.”
Curtis, whose half-brother Nicholas died from a heroin overdose in 1994, reveals she was first prescribed opiates in 1989 after minor plastic surgery on her “puffy eyes”, and she spent the next decade trying to get hold of painkillers any way she could, even stealing from friends and family members.
Her older sister Kelly, who was one of the people she nabbed pills from, was the first person to find out about her addiction in 1998 and Jamie Lee attended her first recovery meeting in February, 1999 – on the same day she came clean to her husband Christopher Guest.
“I’m breaking the cycle that has basically destroyed the lives of generations in my family,” Curtis says. “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.”
The actress has now been sober for nearly 20 years but she continues to attend meetings and offers help and advice to fellow addicts.
“In recovery meetings, anyone who brings up opiates, the entire room will turn and look at me, because I’ll be like, ‘Oh here, talk to me. I’m the opiate girl’,” she tells the publication.
