'I Was Doing Coke Every Day': Lamar Odom Opens Up About Drug Use, Addiction
Lamar Odom did not pull any punches in a first-person story he wrote for the Player's Tribune about the struggles he has faced with addiction the past several years.
The former NBA star also opened up about his cocaine habit and what happened when he ended up in a coma at a Nevada brothel.
"When I woke up in the hospital room in Nevada, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I was trapped inside my own body. My throat hurt like hell. I looked down and I had all these tubes coming out of my mouth.
So I panicked.
I started trying to pull them out, but I couldn’t because my hands were so weak. The nurses came running in to stop me. You ever had a really bad dream, where you’re trying to run away from a monster or some shit, and you just can’t run? Your legs don’t work like they should, and the monster is coming right behind you, and it’s like you’re in slow motion. That’s what it felt like."
Odom explains that it was his severe addiction to cocaine that caused his downfall.
"At that point in my life, I was doing coke every day. Pretty much every second of free time that I had, I was doing coke. I couldn’t control it."
Odom later added:
"That’s the thing people don’t understand. Anybody who’s lived a complicated, drug-infused life like I’ve lived knows the cycle — with women, cheating on my wife, shit like that. Nights when I should have been asleep. Nights when I stayed up sniffing coke. Lot of those nights. When your heart is beating fast. When you should know better. When you’re just riding that roller coaster, man.
You think I wasn’t feeling shame? You think I was blind to what I was doing?
Nah, I wasn’t blind to it. Shame … pain. It’s part of the whole cycle. My brain was broken. As the years went on, and I got into my 30s, my career was winding down, and things just got out of control.
When I was like 32, 33 … I just wanted to get high all the time. That’s it, just get high. And things got dark as hell."
Odom explained that he suffered many losses throughout life, including his mother, six-month-old son and best friend, which led to him using cocaine to mask the pain.
