HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — With the Michael Jackson death investigation centering on the music icon’s alleged use of prescription drugs, Jamie Lee Curtis is opening up about her own addiction to painkillers.
In a blog for the Huffington Post, the 50-year-old actress admits to relying on painkillers at one point to mask the pain she endured after a routine cosmetic surgery.
“I too became addicted,” writes Curtis. “The morphine becomes the warm bath from which to escape painful reality. I was a lucky one. I was able to see that the pain had started long ago and far away and that the finding the narcotic was merely a matter of time.”
Curtis provides very few details on her addiction, but says kicking the habit ranks at the top of her achievements.
“My recovery from drug addiction is the single greatest accomplishment of my life… but it takes work — hard, painful work — but the help is there, in every town and career, drug/drink freed members of society, from every single walk and talk of life to help and guide,” she says.
In comparing her own situation to Jackson’s, Curtis dismisses that the King of Pop became addicted to painkillers because of the injuries he suffered after catching on fire during filming of a Pepsi commerical.
“The explanation is that this moment was the drug start point that eventually took over his life. I don’t believe it,” writes Curtis. “The pain he suffered was from his birth, from his being and becoming the commodity that then made him the omnipotent King of the Pop-Goes-The-Weasel-Jacko-In-The-Neverland-Box that destroyed him. Few children, put into the intense focus of their precious youth being marketed for other’s pleasure, come out unscathed and with any sense of mental balance. I won’t name names but we all know who they are as they have navigated their fame and falls on the covers of magazines and at the top of news hours.”
“I believe Mr. Jackson was in pain,” continues Curtis. “Mr. Jackson was an addict. It is coming out. Everywhere. He wanted relief and would get it in any name, place or method he could. It was and is a conspiracy of silence and I’m sure there were attempts to intervene and I’m sure his family and friends tried … but the addict gets what the addict wants, relief from the pain of their life.”
