Eminem takes the knee during Super Bowl Halftime Show
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Back in 2005, after releasing his greatest hits collection Curtain Call the notorious rapper, now 49, disappeared from the public limelight. For years the rapper struggled to handle addiction to painkillers and sleeping pills but by 2005 it became crippling. He gained weight, lost his creativity and became depressed. But after a long recovery process, including going to rehab, Eminem returned in 2009 for his album Relapse.
In a series of later interviews, the star revealed the secrets behind coping with his addiction.
He told the Guardian as a 37 year old: “I had a pretty bad drug problem.
“I was messing with Valium, Vicodin, Ambien and anything to [help me to] sleep. Basically I’d take Vicodin to get me through my day.”
The star had drug issues for several years but things got especially bad in 2006 when his best friend DeShaun Dupree Holton, known as “Proof”, was murdered on 8 Mile Road in Detroit in 2006.
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Talking about his drug addiction, and the death of Proof, Eminem said: “They had my mood really fd up. I was already depressed and with the drugs it just became a vicious cycle of depression.
“And as if my drug problem wasn’t bad enough, when Proof died it was like, ‘Son of a bitch, what I am going to do now?’.
“I went through a lot when he died. It was the worst time in my life. It just gave me a real legitimate excuse, in my head at least, to use drugs…
“The higher my tolerance got, the more I needed those pills in my body just to feel normal and not feel sick. It’s a vicious cycle. I got over it all last year.”
But years later, the star revealed to Men’s Journal that he managed to find a natural replacement for the pain-killers.
He said: “When I got out of rehab, I needed to lose weight, but I also needed to figure out a way to function sober. Unless I was blitzed out of my mind, I had trouble sleeping. So I started running.
“It gave me a natural endorphin high, but it also helped me sleep, so it was perfect. It’s easy to understand how people replace addiction with exercise.”
He revealed how at the age of 42 he was running around 17 miles a day.
Studies have shown that exercise has promising benefits when it comes to fighting addiction.
One small study offered 38 women who were dealing with drug problems a six month fitness programme involving three days of exercise a week.
Twenty finished the intervention and a year later, five reported that they had weaned off the addiction while ten had decreased drug use.
If you are struggling with drug abuse, you should visit your GP who will be able to discuss your problems and get you treatment.
There are several treatments that the NHS provides to help people wean off drug misuse.
These include talk therapies, such as CBT to help understand the thought patterns that affect the behaviour.
They may also treat you with substitute drugs such as methadone which are usually weaker than the drugs you are currently using.
Doing this means you can stop purchasing drugs from the street, which are more dangerous.
The NHS will also advise you to find support groups such as Narcotics Anonymous who can be reached at ukna.org
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