JACKASS star Steve-O is currently heading around the US on his tour – but at one point he feared he wouldn’t be alive this long.
The 48-year-old has freely admitted his wild lifestyle of death-defying stunts, drinking and drugs got so much at one point he feared he would die by the age of 30.
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His road to sobriety has not been an easy one, with the issues reaching a peak in 2008 when his Jackass co-stars staged an intervention.
Their intervention resulted in him being involuntarily sectioned to a psychiatric hospital in order for him to finally receive the help he desperately needed.
Speaking on the Tamron Hall Show, he joked he “cost a lost of people a lot of money on their celebrity death pool bets […] and I would’ve bet the same.”
He explains that alcoholism runs in his family, with his mother’s side in particular dealing with addiction issues.
But with the success of Jackass, his seeming easy access to drugs and alcohol began to take a massive toll on him.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he explains while cocaine and alcohol were his main vices, he had also tried a list of illegal substances including ketamine and PCP, as well as abusing controlled pills like Valium.
Before the Jackass team, led by Johnny Knoxville, got him sectioned, he had written an email seemingly threatening suicide.
While the initial hold, under California’s 5150 ruling, was just for 72 hours, the behaviour Steve-O exhibited at the facility caused the team to extend this to a two-week holding.
In another interview back in 2019, Steve-O admits his “lowest point” came at a drug dealer’s house, whom he believed to be HIV positive, when he snorted cocaine laced with the dealer’s blood off a table.
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“This is how just desperate and pathetic my addiction was that I sat there knowingly scraping up this tainted, like, blood cocaine,” he said on In Depth with Graham Bensinger.
“I sat there and snorted it, which is so f***ed up. I snorted the blood of an intravenous drug user.”
A photograph Steve-O, real name Stephen Gilchrist, shared on his 10th anniversary of sobriety, sees him with a wild look on his face as he’s surrounded by laughing gas canisters and white powder as he leers over a table.
He has a dispenser in one hand and a cigarette in the other, with his face bright red.
He told LoudWire: “My life was a disaster and I decided about seven days in that I not only wanted to go in treatment, but I didn’t want to waste my time in treatment. If I was going to make the commitment to get sober I wanted to give my self the advantage and really do the things that people to do stay sober.
“Thankfully I’ve been committed to that ever since.”
In March this year, Steve-O marks his 15th year of sobriety, and he has become a vocal advocate for those struggling with addiction and overcoming it.
“It’s been more of an exercise in just understanding that I don’t know how to rein anything in and just kind of accepting that moderation is not my strong suit,” Steve-O told People in 2022.
“Accepting who you are, and what about that is not gonna change, I think is a big part of it for me. I’ve come to accept that I’m never gonna be a moderation guy.”
“As it relates to addictions, I think that it’s about sort of surrendering to the process of recovery… the first step in the 12 steps being admitting that we’re powerless in our lives,” he added.
“We admit defeat, you know? And you surrender when you’ve been defeated. So that’s kinda how you address addiction.”
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