Dennis Quaid Admits He Was a Cocaine Fiend

Dennis Quaid talks cocaine

Actor Dennis Quaid wrote an article for Newsweek magazine where he candidly discussed his drug addiction in the 1980s.

Quaid wrote that his love affair with cocaine started after college when he moved to Los Angeles in 1974. His cocaine use was casual at first, but accelerated to the point that he was barely sleeping for weeks on end.

“By the time I was doing The Big Easy, in the late 1980s, I was a mess. I was getting an hour of sleep a night. I had a reputation for being a bad boy, which seemed like a good thing, but basically I just had my head stuck up my ass. 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. The lack of sleep made it so my focus wasn’t really there, which affected my acting.”

By the 1990′s Dennis Quaid realized he needed help after a bad experience. (That, and his future wife, Meg Ryan, insisted he quit using cocaine before they marry.)

“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.”

Read the entire Newsweek article, “My Favorite Mistake,” written by Dennis Quaid.

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