Dennis Quaid Writes Article Detailing Cocaine Past

(HMG Celebrity News) – Actor Dennis Quaid who stars in this month’s ‘Soul Surfer,’ is doing the interview circuit but wrote his own article about his “biggest mistake” in life and it admits it was his addiction to cocaine.  In a candid guest article for Newsweek, Quaid reveals he was introduced to the social drug when he moved from Houston to LA in 1974. “It was very casual at first,” he says of his drug use. “That’s what people were doing when they were at parties. Cocaine was even in the budgets of movies, thinly disguised.”

“It was supplied, basically, on movie sets because everyone was doing it,” he continues. “People would make deals. Instead of having a cocktail, you’d have a line.”

Quaid earned himself a reputation as a Hollywood bad boy as a result of his addiction but the drugs also contributed to his inability to handle his new fame and he didn’t like the person he had become.

“I was doing my best imitation of an asshole there for a little while, trying to pretend everything was OK,” he reveals. “Meanwhile my life was falling apart, and I noticed it myself, but I was hoping everyone else didn’t.”

“By the time I was doing The Big Easy, in the late 1980s, I was a mess…I’d wake up, snort a line, and swear I wasn’t going to do it again that day. But then 4 o’clock rolled around, and I’d be right back down the same road like a little squirrel on one of those treadmills.”

His epiphany to quit drugs came after his band, the Eclectics, broke up after a “crazy” show, and Quaid realized it was time to make a change.

“I had one of those white-light experiences that night where I kind of realized I was going to be dead in five years if I didn’t change my ways. The next day I was in rehab,” he writes.

Quaid managed to beat his drug demons and went on to rebuild his career in the 1990s.

“That time in my life — those years in the ’90s recovering — actually chiseled me into a person. It gave me the resolve and a resilience to persevere in life. If I hadn’t gone through that period, I don’t know if I’d still be acting. In the end, it taught me humility. I really learned to appreciate what I have in this life.”