As the saying goes, you never forget your first time. But for Russell Brand, the memory of his first encounter with heroin at 19 is too agonizing to dwell on.
“I can’t think about it too much because I start to miss it,” Brand, 14 years sober, exclusively tells Us Weekly. "If you're in pain, psychological pain, you feel like you have a knot in your tummy. If pain is a fist, heroin dives into it, opens it up and relaxes you. It feels so beautiful. It feels like a cuddle, like comfort, like being in your mother's arms. It's so sweet and perfect."
But that sensation is fleeting. Quickly. Already "smoking too much, drinking too much, doing cocaine, taking quite a lot of acid and looking at too much porn," the comedian, 42, says his world began to unravel. "There were terrible, terrible moments of loneliness in a flat where all I had were drugs," he recalls. "That was all I needed. I had a job at MTV. It went. I had a radio show. It went. Everything was going. My friends left me. Girlfriends left me. It was very scary."
But fear only drove him further into his abyss. Every day for nearly fours years, heroin was the staple holding his life together. That is, until his then-manager and also his friend Chip Sommers stepped in to help.
