Facing the Music And Living To Talk About It (14 page)

I STOPPED LIVING
AS IF I DIDN’T CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE.

We were in denial, obviously. The fact is that our bodies didn’t know the difference between
just partying
and serious addiction. Our livers, brains, kidneys and hearts were suffering from just as much damage as the vital organs in those older bar flies and die-hard clubbers.

You can pretend you don’t have demons. You can think of yourself as young and bulletproof, or as someone
just having fun
. But sooner or later, your body will speak the truth, and you will crash and burn. Or worse, you’ll hurt someone else.

Like most binge drinkers, I rationalized my heavy drinking by saying I didn’t do it every day, or I never did it before six o’ clock at night. I also convinced myself that I could stop any time I wanted to. But when my therapist talked to me about my drinking, he asked how I’d feel if I killed someone by driving drunk, or what if my young fans saw me wasted on the streets some night? What if I was kicked out of Backstreet for being a drunk?

The truth is, you can hide from the demons, but you can’t hide from the consequences. If you are acting like the king or queen of denial when it comes to binge drinking or drug abuse, you certainly aren’t alone. My friends and I were there and so are many other people of all ages and economic levels. I’ve seen reports that indicate nearly nineteen percent of those between the ages of 12 and 20 have tried binge drinking and a CDC survey found that as many as one quarter of all high school students and adults between the ages of 18 and 35 have done it.

Experts say that more than thirty million adults binge drink now, and that number isn’t decreasing. I was also surprised to learn that more than forty thousand people die each year in the United States because of it—that’s half of all alcohol-related deaths in the country. Medical reports say that not all binge drinkers are alcoholics, though most have serious alcohol abuse problems.

The toll is steep. One study reported that those who binge drink are fourteen times more likely to drive while intoxicated than moderate drinkers. Approximately five thousand young people under the legal drinking age die from alcohol-related causes each year, but those are just the easy stats to collect. Who knows how many people die prematurely because of the damage they’ve done to their bodies and minds from alcohol and drug abuse?

Medical research has found evidence that binge drinking can affect the development of brains in teenagers, whose bodies typically haven’t reached full maturity yet. According to one study, binge-drinking teens may actually suffer a loss of white matter in their brains, which is the tissue that affects learning and controls communication.

Drinking until you drop is a huge trend on college campuses in particular, but it’s happening off campus too. I’ve heard that there are concerns about an increase in binge drinking among women with children. I read a few years ago about a woman who killed herself and seven others in a head-on collision while driving the wrong-way on a highway in New York State. She was en route home from a camping trip with five children in the car including her son, daughter and three nieces all under the age of nine. Police found a bottle of vodka in the car and subsequent tests showed that she’d had the equivalent of ten drinks in her system and that she’d been smoking marijuana too.

It’s one thing to endanger your own life with reckless drinking and drug use, but can you imagine killing your own children, loved ones and other innocent people?

BINGE AND A BUMP

As I mentioned earlier, my friends and I would often take a hit of cocaine late in the night so we could keep partying. It’s a pretty common practice among the clubbing set especially.

At the time, I thought feeling more awake and pumped up was a good idea, but I later found out that when you drink heavily and then do cocaine on top of it, some weird and dangerous reactions occur in the body. For one thing, cocaine is a stimulant that sends alcohol more quickly to the brain, so if you’ve been binge drinking, cocaine will make you drunker faster. Worse than that, the mix of alcohol and coke in your liver can create a toxic chemical called cocaethylene. This chemical is even nastier than it sounds. I’m told it is the only known example of the body creating a third drug after you’ve taken two others. Along with damaging your liver, cocaethylene may also cause serious heart problems or even heart attack.

When I started looking into this for reasons I’ll explain later, I also discovered that there are some potentially serious dangers to drinking while using many prescription drugs, too; especially depressants because the combination increases the depressant effects of alcohol. Adderall, an amphetamine used to treat ADD and other disorders and often taken by college students to help them focus while studying, should never be mixed with alcohol, nor should sleep medications for obvious reasons. Even aspirin, antihistamines, ibuprofen and acetaminophen can cause problems to your liver or stomach if you drink with them in your system.

My research into all of the dangers of mixing alcohol and drugs came only after I’d abused my own body and mind for years by drinking and taking whatever drug was offered. I never thought of my binge drinking and drug use as an addiction, but in many ways, I was an addict. Acknowledging that I wasn’t just a fun-loving party guy, but someone with a serious problem, was a really tough but necessary step toward changing my life.

In my heart and mind, I knew that there was something more to my heavy drinking and drug use than simply wanting to have a good time with my buddies. I was afraid to ask myself what the real reason was because I didn’t want to deal with that demon. My therapist helped me understand that you can’t change your life for the better if you refuse to honestly look at what drives your self-destructive behavior. Sooner or later, you have to ask, “Why am I doing this?” Am I really just looking for a good time or am I self-medicating so I don’t have to face my fears? Is this the only way I can deal with the pain? The depression? The emptiness in my life?

I’D GET
ANTSY AND LONELY
AND THE DEMONS WOULD COME OUT TO TAUNT ME.

Like many people who abuse drugs and alcohol, I pretended that passing out or getting sick night after night was no big deal.
Everyone else was doing it
, I thought. I certainly had friends who were much bigger drinkers and drug users than I was. Of course, I was playing the denial game, trying to convince myself and everyone else that I was in control and that my behavior was perfectly normal. Some people can snap themselves out of that self-delusional pattern in one of their more lucid, sober moments. Others need the help of friends, family or professionals. I encourage you to do whatever works for you, but urge you to do it before it’s too late.

Eventually I realized that rather than trying to
break
self-destructive behavioral patterns, it’s much easier to replace them with more constructive activities. Instead of going drinking every night, for example, I began working out, reading motivational books, and focusing on expanding my mind and building up my body. My therapist helped me learn that replacing the highs of heavy drinking and drug use with the much longer-lasting highs of a good work out or self-education would take a lot of the stress and anxieties out of my life.

Part of my problem was that my career led to a lifestyle where I had long periods of intense activity including touring, recording and traveling, followed by long periods with much more idle time on my hands. I didn’t know what to do with myself during the slower times on the road or at home. I’d get antsy and lonely and the demons would come out to taunt me. To hide from them, I’d call up my drinking buddies and hit the bars.

Finding other ways to spend my free time was a big step in the right direction. I began using that time to explore new career opportunities, healthier lifestyles, and new subjects that had intrigued me.

PROMISES TO KEEP

I didn’t discover these methods for breaking my addiction to binge drinking and drugs until I committed to changing my life. Because I had no idea where to start, I figured I’d ask for some help.

That first step, when I called my publicist to accompany me to rehab, wasn’t an easy one to take. I remember sitting and crying in my car for what seemed like hours before driving to get her. We then drove to Promises, an addiction treatment center in a big, old craftsman-style house in West L.A.

I WAS
IN A TRANCE
AS WE WALKED IN.

I was in a trance as we walked in. My publicist explained that I was still under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, and maybe Ecstasy too. The admissions person calmly asked me a series of questions as if this was a normal thing—having a totally wasted boy-band singer walk in blitzed and scared out of his mind.

While I was being given a tour of the place, I recognized other celebrities in residence. Some of them tried to hide their faces. Others looked at me like, “It’s about time you checked in.”

Seeing them made the reality of my situation hit all the harder. Promises was obviously a well-run, comfortable place, but I wasn’t sure if it was for me. I wasn’t much for structured environments like this. It felt too confining. M
aybe I needed to do this on my own
, I thought.

I told the Promises staff member that I wanted to go home and think about the residential program. He suggested that I begin my treatment as an outpatient patient, which would allow me to come back for counseling and therapy. Really, I’d decided that before anyone else could help me, I needed to get my mind cleansed and my thinking straightened out. The only way I could see doing that was to remove myself from the poisoned environment I’d been living in.

IT FELT
TOO CONFINING
.

Then the thought hit me:
Cool Springs. I need to go back to Cool Springs.

PERSONAL NOTES