Jamie Lee Curtis is reflecting on being “incredibly lucky” to have overcome her struggle with substance abuse over two decades ago.
“I was an opiate addict, and I liked a good opiate buzz,” the “Everything Everywhere All At Once” star told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” in an appearance that aired Friday but was taped before the beginning of the Screen Actors Guild strike.
“If fentanyl was available, as easily available as it is today on the street, I’d be dead,” the 64-year-old Oscar winner said.
Curtis, who told Variety in 2019 that she’d battled a “secret Vicodin addiction” for over 10 years, said her life could have gone down a very dark route had she not gotten clean.
“My worst day was almost invisible to anyone else,” she said. “I’m lucky. I didn’t make terrible decisions high, or under the influence, that then for the rest of my life I regret.”
“There are women in prison whose lives have been shattered by drugs and alcohol,” she continued. “Not because they were violent felons, not because they were horrible people, but because they were addicts.”
Curtis said her sobriety made everything in life “crystal and clear,” and that she feels “incredibly lucky that that wasn’t my path” because she was “headed there.”
The “Halloween” star reflected on her family’s history of substance abuse. Tragically, her brother Nicholas died as a young man due to a heroin overdose in 1994.
“He was clean and sober, and he went out and used one time, and died from an overdose,” Curtis told Scarborough. “And he is one of millions and millions of people whose lives have been extinguished because of addiction.”
In a 2021 interview with the “Today” show, Curtis spoke about “breaking the cycle” of addiction that “destroyed the lives of generations in my family.” She called her sobriety her “greatest accomplishment.”
“My sobriety has been the key to freedom, the freedom to be me, to not be looking in the mirror in the reflection and trying to see somebody else,” she said at the time. “I look in the mirror. I see myself. I accept myself. And I move on, because you know what? The world is filled with things we need to do.”
Just a month before, Curtis had also looked back on her sobriety journey with a FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS