Dax Shepard Revealed Why He's So Honest About His Past Drug Use Just Weeks Before Sharing His Relapse After 16 Years Of Sobriety
"If you're not going to be honest about stuff, there are just roadblocks."
Dax Shepard opened up about why he's been so honest about his sobriety journey just weeks before publicly addressing his recent relapse.
Dax first started using drugs and drinking alcohol in high school, but eventually sought help for his addiction in 2004 after realising he was finding himself in "increasingly dangerous situations".
"I just loved to get fucked up," Dax told Playboy in 2012. "Drinking, cocaine, opiates, marijuana, diet pills, pain pills, everything. Mostly, my love was Jack Daniel's and cocaine. I lived for going down the rabbit hole of meeting weird people. Of course, come Monday, I would be tallying up all the different situations, and each one was progressively more dangerous. I got lucky in that I didn’t go to jail."
Since then, Dax has never shied away from discussing his past addictions, revealing during a recent podcast appearance that failing to be honest leads to "roadblocks" in interviews which prevent "advancing" the conversation around drug use and sobriety.
"There will be people who don't want to admit they smoke weed," he said during the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast. "I’m just a little confused by it."
"If you're not going to be honest about stuff, there are just roadblocks in interviewing," he went on.
"I could advance this whole thing, but I don't want to tell people that I've done cocaine so now I can't advance it because of that," he added. "They all end up being little roadblocks along the way."
The episode was recorded just weeks before Dax shared during an instalment of his own podcast that he'd recently relapsed and had started taking opioids after 16 years of sobriety.
View this photo on Instagram
Dax revealed that the relapse began after "crushing all the bones in his hand" following an ATV accident. "After I ride sometimes on the track, I feel I'm entitled to take two Vicodin at the end of the day because I am in pain," he said.
"For the last eight weeks ... I'm on them all day," he went on. "I'm allowed to be on them at some dosage because I have a prescription, and then I'm also augmenting that. And then all the prescriptions run out, and I'm now just taking 30 mil Oxys that I've bought whenever I decide I can do [it]."
View this photo on Instagram
"I'm lying to other people, and I know I have to quit," he went on. "But my tolerance is going up so quickly that I'm now in a situation where I'm taking, you know, eight 30s a day."
"I know that's an amount that's going to result in a pretty bad withdrawal," Dax added. "And I start getting really scared, and I'm starting to feel really lonely. And I just have this enormous secret."
Dax revealed that he eventually told his wife, Kristen Bell, about the relapse. He went to a meeting, which he described as the "most incredible 90 minutes," and now feels "hopeful and humble" about the future — although he was worried about the effect "coming clean publicly" might have on his wife.
"Kristen doesn't deserve for the next six months for every fucking interview she does to be, 'Oh, Dax relapsed,'" he said. "I'm sorry and I'm embarrassed I've put other people in this situation."
Last month, Kristen publicly marked Dax's 16th year of sobriety with an emotional Instagram post and caption.
View this photo on Instagram
"Today is my husband's 16th sobriety birthday," she wrote. "My daughter woke him up with this sign, and a sketch of the one and only Ronald Weasley(absolutely random, and also perfect). Happy birthday Daxy. Thank you for dedicating your life to the hard and wonderful work of sobriety, so that we could share it with you."