For years, actress Jamie Lee Curtis struggled with drug addiction. She managed to keep it a secret for ages but eventually got caught by a friend who saw her swallowing five Vicodin pills in the kitchen of her Los Angeles home.
Despite an emotional heart-to-heart talk, Curtis continued to abuse the drug until one day in 1999 when she came across a magazine article about addiction to painkillers. That was her turning point.
Curtis pulled herself together and started attending recovery meetings. She has been sober for 20 years but those early days were not always easy for the then 40-year-old actress, as she revealed in an interview with Variety.
"I was terrified," she said of the first few times she attended recovery meetings. "I was just terrified that someone in the recovery community was going to betray my trust. But it is my experience that that doesn't really happen and that my fear was unfounded," she continued.
Addiction is something that runs in Curtis' family. The "Halloween" star admitted that she would share drugs with her father, who was addicted to alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. Her brother was also an addict and died from a heroin overdose when he was 21 years old, but this did not stop her from repeating the cycle. And she hid her addiction well.
It was only after attending her first recovery meeting that Curtis revealed to her husband that she had a problem. Her family immediately banded together to support her efforts to achieve sobriety.
"They see how much I try to work it and try to talk to other people and be a part of a community of people who are in recovery," she said.
In an interview with People, Curtis said she just reached a point where she decided to break the cycle that "basically destroyed the lives of generations" in her family. "Getting sober remains my single greatest accomplishment," she continued. One that was "bigger than my husband, bigger than both of my children, and bigger than any work, success, failure. Anything."
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