Jason Newsted Opens Up on Painkiller Addiction in 90s + 2000s

Jason Newsted opened up about his painkiller addiction in the ’90s and 2000s during a new interview.

Newsted will head out on the road with The Chophouse Band for a North American tour startingJuly 1, but he’s also been busy working on his memoir for the last few years. Speaking with Spin, he shared that he has 130 chapters written for it already and that it’s filled with more personal stories than ones Metallica fans have already heard dozens of times.

One of the personal journeys the memoir will detail is his experience with addiction, primarily to painkillers.

“In the mid- to late ’90s, I had a lot of pretty serious neck and spine issues. It’s easy to see the map of why this is fucked up. In that time, I would start taking Vicodin and get through some days. I kept going and going and going. The injury was in a place that couldn’t really be repaired,” Newsted recalled.

The rocker revealed that he had an on-and-off struggle with painkillers for about 10 to 12 years. However, it was pretty consistent from about 2004 to 2008 because he had a few back-to-back surgeries within that timeframe.

“I finally got off that shit by the time I was just about to do my first exhibit. It was 16 years ago this week in San Francisco, May 2010. I had peeled myself off the drugs and started getting back to get back to myself again. That’s when the global art thing started happening for me and the Paris gallery representative. I had about 10 years of that,” he continued.

Newsted admitted that it’s been tough to relive some of those years while working on the memoir, which he thinks may be part of the reason it’s taken him a while to through it. It’s an emotional experience that requires taking breaks and returning to the material later on.

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“I’m on my third rewrite/edit of my own,” he added. “I’ve tried to work with a couple of different authors. I sent back an advance or two. I just wasn’t ready yet. Now I’m just doing it myself so it’s all just going to be my hand, in my language.”

Earlier this year, Newsted had revealed that his addiction was the real reason he left Metallica.”I was way up against myself and if I didn’t get some kind of help, I was gonna die,” he said on the Let There Be Talk podcast, “And so I just said, ‘You guys, can I have a minute? Please give me a minute.’ And they said, ‘No.’”

“I feel I’ve won this business. I feel I’ve won, figured it out. Itmight not have been very pleasant a lot of the time, especially in transition times. But I won and they [Metallica] won and we all won because I was brave enough to make a decision to save us all,” he also told Loudwire Nights radio host Chuck Armstrong in May.

The musician is one of many people who’ve developed an addiction to painkillers following a medical procedure. The American Society of Anesthesiologists published an article in 2021 notingthat more than one in five “opioid-naive” patients (people who didn’t have an opioid prescription filled in the prior year) were found to have continued using opioids three months after a procedure.

The findings highlighted the role that post-operative opioids play in addiction.

Kudos to Newsted on 16 years of sobriety.

See what other rockers have said about getting sober in the gallery below.

If you or someone you know is struggling with drug and/or alcohol dependence, help is available through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website. To speak to someone on the phone, dial 1-800-622-HELP (1-800-622-4357) or send a text message to 1-800-487-4889.