Dax Shepard Reveals the Lowest Low from His Struggle with Alcoholism and Drug Addiction

People often say that alcoholics and drug addicts won't get help until they've finally hit rock bottom, but that's not true according to actor Dax Shepard.

"There's a couple of common fallacies about sobriety. One of them being that people hit a bottom and then that's that," Shepard - a recovering alcoholic and drug abuser - told Sam Jones of The Off Camera Show. "Most addicts have many bottoms. I had many, many. I had many events that were even worse than the one that ended up being my last event."

Shepard added that his rock bottom began on a Friday night when he went out on the town after topping up his illicit supply of prescription drugs.

"I'd seen my pill drug dealer earlier in the day, and I'd gotten pills for what I had would have assumed would be for the next week-and-a-half," Shepard recalled. "Maybe a hundred Vicodin, 80 Percocet, 40 Xanax, 50 or 60 diet pills."

And that was just for about 10 days. But even with that eye-popping stash, Shepard decided to add a little bit more to the haul when a friend offered to pick up some cocaine. 

"I got an eight ball, and then I'm at the bar, and I'm like...I don't want to be at this bar. I want to be back at my apartment doing [drugs]."

But first, he made a pitstop at the liquor store. 

"I stopped on the way home and I got two fifths of Jack [Daniels] and a case of beer."

And that's pretty much the last thing he could remember doing on that awful Friday night. But the effects of the binge would last until he abruptly regained consciousness.

"I come to in my bed, and it's dark out. And I'm like, 'Oh, man, it must be Saturday night,'" Shepard recalled. "I'm a little foggy. I remember buying all that stuff and going back to my apartment, but that's where my memory stops. I get up, and my ribs are hurting really bad, and then I go out in the kitchen and I see that it's all gone: everything's gone. There's two empty fifths, there's beer cans everywhere, there's plastic from where the coke was, the pill box is empty."

And to this day, Shepard doesn't know if he took all of that in one night or over the course of the weekend, which was one long blackout. When Shepard woke up, it was actually Monday night, not Saturday.

"I've never had an experience like that where I've missed two or three days," he said. "You would call this a rock bottom in that I fully acknowledge that you should not wake up from that. Ninety percent of people are not waking up from that amount of stuff. And I called my mom, crying. Just scared—I scared myself so bad. And you would assume that would be it. But no, there was a good year of drug use and alcohol use beyond that moment, so the life-threatening thing wasn't the moment."

The moment that compelled him to sober up came during a vacation in Hawaii. To find out what made Shepard finally seek help, check out the full interview below.



Can we see some ID please?

You must be 19 years of age or older to enter.