By January 1986, Hicks was using recreational drugs and his financial resources had dwindled. However his career received another upturn in 1987, when he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's "Young Comedians Special". The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years performed about 300 times a year. On the album "Relentless", he jokes that he quit using drugs because "once you've been taken aboard a UFO, it's kind of hard to top that", although in his performances, he continued to enthusiastically praise the virtues of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms.