Music • Recovery • Long Read
He was the best-selling music artist of an entire decade. He was also, at his worst, taking 75 to 80 Valium a night, sourced from ten different dealers, lying on his bathroom floor staring at the ceiling fan, unable to move for two days. Then his best friend was murdered. Then he overdosed on methadone and was two hours from dying. Then, somehow, he got sober. This is the full story of how Marshall Mathers found his way back — and what he built on the other side of it.
By The Sober Standard
There is a moment on the track “Deja Vu” — off Relapse, the 2009 album that announced Eminem’s return to a world that had spent years wondering if he’d ever come back — that I keep returning to when I think about this story. He’s describing the night his body gave out, the night ten drug dealers and seventy-five Valium a day and the compounding grief of losing the person who meant most to him in the world finally did what physics says it should have done years earlier. He collapsed in his bathroom. He woke up with tubes in him, unable to speak, unable to process where he was or what had happened. His organs were shutting down. The doctors who worked on him said that if he had arrived two hours later, he would not have survived.
He checked himself out of the hospital before he was fully detoxed.
And then, within a month, his drug use — in his own words — “ramped right back to where it was before.”
This is not the story of a man who hit rock bottom and saw the light. It is the story of a man who hit rock bottom, checked himself out of it, and had to find the bottom again before the floor would hold. It is, in that sense, not a Hollywood recovery narrative. It is an honest one. And in the world of prescription drug addiction — the specific kind of addiction that took hold of Marshall Mathers III during the years when he was also, simultaneously, the most commercially successful musician on the planet — honesty is both rarer and more useful than any version of the tidy arc.
He got sober on April 20, 2008. He has stayed sober since. He is now seventeen years into a recovery that has produced four studio albums, a handful of Grammy Awards, a catalogue of songs that have changed the conversation around addiction in popular culture, a thriving career as a father and mentor, and the specific quiet authority of a man who survived something that should have killed him and decided — with the help of his daughters, a twelve-step program, an improbable friendship with Elton John, and seventeen miles of daily running on a treadmill — to use the extra time well.
This is that story.
Marshall, Before the Fame
Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born on October 17, 1972, in St. Joseph, Missouri. He was raised by his mother, Debbie, a woman he would spend years fighting with and rapping about, in conditions that moved frequently and were never stable. By the time he was a teenager, they had settled in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Detroit, where Marshall was one of the few white kids, where he was bullied persistently, and where he found the one thing that the chaos of his home life hadn’t been able to take from him: rap.
He dropped out of Lincoln High School at seventeen. He worked the kitchen at Gilbert’s Lodge, a family restaurant, washing dishes and cooking for minimum wage — sixty hours a week for six months, fired just before Christmas in the year his daughter Hailie was born, with, as he later told it, forty dollars to buy her something for her birthday. He had already attempted suicide by 1997. The floor was always somewhere close by.
What saved him — or at least, what pulled him upward — was Slim Shady, the alter ego he developed in the mid-nineties as a vehicle for everything that felt too dangerous or too dark to say as Marshall Mathers: the rage, the absurdism, the pitch-black comedy, the violence that was always also a kind of confessional. He was a white kid trying to build a career in a genre that had structural reasons to be skeptical, and Slim Shady gave him a way to be outrageous enough to get past the skepticism and authentic enough to earn the respect.
He caught the attention of Dr. Dre in 1997 after finishing second in the Rap Olympics freestyle competition in Los Angeles. Dre signed him to Aftermath. And in 1999, The Slim Shady LP went triple platinum. In 2000, The Marshall Mathers LP sold close to two million copies in its first week. He was the best-selling music artist of an entire decade.
He told Rolling Stone that his addiction “didn’t really start until my career took off.” He was probably in his early twenties before he had his first beer. But the bigger the shows got, the bigger the after-parties. And drugs were always around.
The Pill That Started It
The specific gateway into full-blown addiction, by Eminem’s own detailed account, was a prescription — the most prosaic kind of beginning, and the kind that the prescription drug crisis in America has visited on millions of people who never saw it coming.
During the filming of 8 Mile in 2002 — sixteen-hour days on set, a punishing schedule, very little time to sleep — someone handed him an Ambien. “It knocked me the f— out,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘I need this all the time.’ So I got a prescription.”
That’s the whole thing, right there. Not weakness. Not a character flaw. A prescription sleeping pill handed to an exhausted man in a high-pressure environment. An experience of relief so complete that the brain immediately filed it under essential. The subsequent history — the Vicodin, the Valium, the methadone, the ten simultaneous dealers — follows from that night with the mechanical logic of a disease that doesn’t announce itself as a disease until it is far too late to treat it as anything less.
He and his crew started making runs to Tijuana to source Vicodin and other pills more cheaply than they could get them in Los Angeles. He describes the Tijuana trips in his 2022 XXL essay with the kind of detail that makes them feel both absurd and completely real: the last trip, second in line at customs, the guy in front of them getting thrown to the ground, pills pulled from his pockets, their own pants “frickin’ stuffed” with whatever they’d bought. They got through. “Obviously, if I ended up in jail, the album probably wouldn’t have come out and nothing with my rap career would’ve ever happened. I would’ve been done right then.”
He wasn’t done. He was just starting.
The functioning addict period — which is the period that most people in grey-area addiction recognize the most acutely, because it’s the period when you can most plausibly tell yourself you don’t have a problem — lasted several years. He was producing The Eminem Show, winning Grammys, managing Shady Records, raising Hailie. He was also taking more pills every week, unable to tell you quite when or how the count had climbed so high, not sure exactly when I like this had become I need this and I need this had become I cannot function without this.
“I was the worst kind of addict, a functioning addict,” he told the New York Times in 2009. “I was so deep into my addiction at one point that I couldn’t picture myself being able to do anything without some kind of drug.”
This is the part of the story that the word addiction sometimes fails to capture. Not the spectacle of rock bottom — the arrest, the overdose, the tabloid moment. But the ordinary, grinding accumulation of daily dependency, where the substance isn’t the highlight of the day anymore but the floor beneath everything else. You are not taking pills to feel good. You are taking pills to feel normal. To get to a baseline that used to be available without chemicals and is no longer.
He told Vibe in 2009: “Valium, Ambien, the numbers got so high I don’t even know what I was taking.”
2005: The First Rehab, and Why It Didn’t Work
In 2005, Eminem cancelled the European leg of the Anger Management Tour, citing exhaustion and an addiction to prescription sleeping drugs. He checked into rehab.
He has described the experience with characteristic bluntness, and with an honesty about why it failed that is more useful to anyone reading this than any idealised account of therapeutic breakthrough: “Every addict in rehab feels like everyone’s staring at them. With me, everyone was staring at me. I could never be comfortable. There were people there that treated me normally. Then there were a bunch of f—ing idiots who aren’t even concentrating on their own sobriety because they’re so worried about mine. They’re stealing my hats, my books — it was chaos.”
He also said: “And, at the time, I didn’t really want to get clean. Everybody else wanted me to. And anyone will tell you, if you’re not ready, nothing is going to change you.”
This is, in the long literature of recovery, one of the most important sentences anyone can say about addiction treatment. The readiness has to come from inside. The environment can support it, the program can structure it, the people around you can create the conditions for it — but the decision, at some fundamental level, has to be made by the person in the room. The research on recovery outcomes consistently shows that treatment entered under external pressure, without genuine internal motivation, produces significantly worse outcomes than treatment entered by someone who has found their own reason to change.
Eminem hadn’t found his reason yet. He left rehab and relapsed not long after.
What came next was worse than what came before.
April 11, 2006: The Night Proof Was Shot
DeShaun Holton — known professionally as Proof, one sixth of D12, the person who had been at the centre of Eminem’s creative and personal life for as long as hip-hop had been his life — was shot and killed at a Detroit nightclub on April 11, 2006. He was 32 years old. He left behind a wife and children. He also left behind Marshall Mathers, who had never had a friend who occupied that particular position — the rock, the confessor, the person who knew you before any of it mattered commercially and was going to know you regardless of whether any of it continued — and who now had no idea what to do with the hole.
“The best way to describe Proof would be a rock,” Eminem told a reporter in 2010. “Somebody to confide in, somebody who always had your back.”
What happened to him in the weeks after Proof’s death is documented in his 2022 XXL essay in language that is both precise and devastating. He was in his house alone. He was lying in bed, unable to move, staring at the ceiling fan. He kept taking pills. “I literally couldn’t walk for two days when that happened,” he wrote, “and eventually my drug use f—in’ skyrocketed. I had f—in’ 10 drug dealers at one time that I’m getting my s— from. Seventy-five to 80 Valiums a night, which is a lot. I don’t know how the f— I’m still here. I was numbing myself.”
He also told Rolling Stone: “Every day I had a pocketful of pills, and I would just go into the studio and goof off… I wasn’t the only person grieving — he left a wife and kids. But I was very much in my own grief. I was so high at his funeral. It disgusts me to say it, but I felt like it was about me.”
The guilt in that last sentence — it disgusts me to say it — is real and it matters. Because the thing that addiction does to grief is not just numb it. It distorts it. It makes the grief feel personal in a way that collapses other people’s losses into your own, and then uses the chemicals to manage the guilt about that collapse, and then requires more chemicals to manage the guilt about the chemicals, and the loop tightens until you are seventy-five Valium deep on a night when your best friend’s funeral was last week and you cannot walk.
This is what unmanaged grief looks like alongside active addiction. It is not dramatic in the way that television dramatises it. It is quiet and horizontal and it happens alone.
December 2007: Two Hours From Dying
By late 2007, Eminem had been operating for months on a pharmaceutical regime that he himself could no longer fully account for. A dealer told him methadone was “just like Vicodin, and easier on your liver.” He took them.
One night, he collapsed in his bathroom.
He woke up in hospital with tubes in him, unable to speak, unable to understand what had happened or where he was. His organs — liver, kidneys — were shutting down. His doctors, by his own account, did not think he would survive. He later described the quantity he had ingested as the equivalent of four bags of heroin. He was, they told him, approximately two hours from death.
He missed Christmas with his children — Hailie, Alaina, and Stevie — because he was in a hospital room with tubes and machines keeping him alive instead.
He checked himself out before he was fully detoxed. He tore his meniscus falling asleep on his sofa. He had a seizure at home. And within a month, his drug use had returned to where it was before the overdose.
He later wrote about this moment with the specific clarity of someone who has spent years trying to understand how a near-fatal overdose can fail to produce lasting sobriety: “I thought it was a sign of weakness to have an addiction. I didn’t even want to believe it was a disease. But I realized it when I f—ing almost died and then I still went back to using. I literally almost died.”
This is the sentence that cuts through every misunderstanding about how addiction works. He almost died and he went straight back to using. Not because he was stupid, not because he was reckless, not because he had decided that his life wasn’t worth preserving. Because the disease had reached a point where the self-preservation instinct — the most fundamental drive in human neurobiology — was no longer strong enough to override the chemical dependency. The brain, rewired by years of opioid use, had reordered its priorities.
He needed help. He knew it. But he also needed to be ready in the way that 2005 had shown he wasn’t ready. He tried attending church meetings to get clean. He was asked for autographs. He found an addiction counsellor to work with privately. And slowly, haltingly, the readiness that had been absent in 2005 began to arrive.
April 20, 2008: The Day He Finally Ran With It
Eminem got sober on April 20, 2008. He has noted the date with characteristic wryness — the specific irony of a former drug addict achieving lasting sobriety on the most marijuana-associated date in the calendar is not lost on him.
What made 2008 different from 2005 was not any single external event. It was the accumulation: the overdose, the tubes, the Christmas he missed, the children who had watched him deteriorate, the two years of increasingly out-of-control grief after Proof’s death, and — perhaps most critically — the moment when he finally reached the same conclusion that Robert Downey Jr. reached outside a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway, the same moment that Bradley Cooper reached after a dinner with Will Arnett: not I want to stop, but I don’t think I can continue doing this.
He admitted, for the first time, that he was an addict. He got a sponsor. He began attending twelve-step meetings regularly. He had previously avoided them because of the impossibility of anonymity — “When Bugs Bunny walks into rehab, people are going to turn and look” — and now, in his private counselling sessions and in whatever meeting configuration his team could arrange, he began doing the actual work of recovery rather than the performance of attempting it.
He also made two phone calls that would turn out to be essential.
The first was to a private addiction counsellor, who he continued seeing weekly for years.
The second was to Elton John.
Elton John, and the Weekly Call
Eminem and Elton John had first met in 2001, at the Grammy Awards, where they performed “Stan” together in a moment that remains one of the stranger and more moving events in the ceremony’s history — a gay British rock icon and a Detroit rapper who had spent considerable lyrical energy on homophobic content, standing on a stage together, making something that transcended both of their individual contexts. The performance was controversial. It was also, in retrospect, the beginning of a friendship that would one day keep one of them alive.
When Eminem was trying to get clean in 2008, Elton John was among the first people he called. John, who had been sober for nearly two decades by then and who had built his own recovery on the twelve-step foundation, became what Eminem later described as “like my sponsor.”
“He usually calls me once a week to check on me, just to make sure I’m on the up-and-up,” Eminem told Men’s Journal in 2015. “He was actually one of the first people I called when I wanted to get clean.”
The image of Elton John calling Eminem weekly to check on his sobriety is not the one that most people carry in their heads when they think about either of them. It is also, I would argue, the truest image of what recovery actually looks like in practice: not the dramatic intervention, not the rock bottom moment, not the cinematic breakthrough — but a regular phone call, week after week, from someone who knows the terrain and is willing to walk alongside you through it for as long as it takes.
This is what we call at The Sober Standard the relational foundation of lasting recovery. The accountability of someone checking in. The security of knowing that when the voice in your head says maybe just one — as it did to Eminem, even a year into sobriety, an experience he documented in Relapse’s “Deja Vu” with frightening precision — there is a person you can call instead.
The Body, the Running, and the Replacement Addiction
When Eminem checked into rehab in early 2008 — this time for real, this time with the readiness that had been absent three years earlier — he weighed close to 230 pounds. The years of pills and near-inactivity and whatever you eat when you are sourcing drugs from ten different dealers had done to his body what sustained addiction does to any body: it had taken everything available and redirected it toward the single priority that addiction has established.
The detox was as brutal as coming off years of opioid dependency is always brutal. He was awake for three weeks straight. Day and night, unable to sleep, relearning how to speak, relearning how to walk, relearning the motor functions that the body reassigns when it stops requiring them. He described it as having to rebuild himself from essentially zero.
He also, and this is the part of Eminem’s recovery story that deserves more attention than it gets, developed a profoundly healthy replacement addiction.
He started running.
Not jogging. Not thirty minutes on a treadmill as part of a general wellness programme. Running with the same all-or-nothing intensity that had produced every extreme of his life up to that point. At his peak, he was covering seventeen miles a day. “It gave me a natural endorphin high, but it also helped me sleep, so it was perfect,” he told Men’s Journal. “It’s easy to understand how people replace addiction with exercise. One addiction for another — but one that’s good for them.”
He lost eighty pounds. He rebuilt a body that the pills had inflated and dulled. He found, in the rhythm of distance running, something that served the same neurological function that the pills had served — the regulation of dopamine, the production of endorphins, the meditative blankness of sustained physical effort — without the destruction.
This is, as the research on recovery consistently shows, one of the most effective strategies in long-term sobriety maintenance: the intentional construction of healthy compulsions to replace the unhealthy one. Exercise. Creative work. Routine. Community. The things that fill the space the substance used to occupy — not because the space disappears, but because, as Eminem has put it, he has “an addict’s brain” and the addict’s brain will always seek something to fix on. The question is what you give it.
Hailie, Alaina, Stevie, and the Reason That Stuck
Every durable recovery story has a why. Not just a how — the program, the sponsor, the meetings, the seventeen miles — but the reason underneath it all that makes the daily choice not just possible but worth making. For Robert Downey Jr., it was Susan and the life she wouldn’t share with someone who wasn’t clean. For Ryan Sheckler, it was his daughters and the moment he understood he was hurting people he loved. For Bradley Cooper, it was fatherhood and the specific grief of his father’s death.
For Eminem, it was three children.
Hailie Jade Mathers — his biological daughter, born Christmas Day 1995, the baby he had forty dollars to buy a gift for when he was fired from the restaurant before Christmas — was the person he had been rapping to for his entire career, the one whose name appeared on track after track as proof that something in his life was worth protecting. Alaina and Stevie, his adopted daughters, completed the picture. He had missed Christmas with all three of them because he was in a hospital with tubes in him.
“I love them so much and they’ve helped me through so many things,” he told the New York Times in 2010. “I think I’ve calmed down a bit.”
The understatement in that last sentence — coming from Marshall Mathers, who had never been accused of understatement — is telling. Calmed down a bit. The man who had been taking eighty Valium a night, who had woken up in a hospital room unable to speak, who had relapsed within a month of a near-fatal overdose: calmed down a bit.
What he means, I think, is something more precise than calm. He means that the thing which drove the addiction — the restlessness, the self-loathing, the inability to sit still inside his own life — had found somewhere to go. Three daughters to raise. A career to rebuild. A community of recovery to belong to. A weekly call with Elton John. Seventeen miles in the morning.
He also, in getting sober, found something that no one who only knew him as Slim Shady would have predicted: compassion for his mother.
“It never really occurred to him that addiction runs in his family,” he said after getting sober. “He finally understands and has compassion for his mother.”
This is the arc of recovery that the dramatic narratives almost always skip: not the moment of getting clean, but what understanding your own addiction teaches you about the people you spent years blaming for everything that went wrong. His mother, Debbie — chaotic, inconsistent, the subject of lawsuits and diss tracks and years of public estrangement — had her own relationship with substances, her own wounds, her own version of the inherited disease. Getting sober didn’t excuse any of it. But it made it legible. It made the person underneath the chaos visible in a way that active addiction never allows.
Relapse, Recovery, and the Music That Did the Work
One of the things that makes Eminem’s recovery story different from virtually every other celebrity sobriety narrative — different from John Goodman’s private twelve-step work, different from John Mayer’s calculated cost-benefit analysis, different from Tom Holland’s accidental self-discovery — is that he documented all of it, in real time, in his music. And not in the soft-focus language of gratitude and learning but in the specific, unsparing, sometimes uncomfortable language of what it actually felt like.
Relapse (2009) — his first album after achieving sobriety — is not, despite the title, an album about relapsing. It is an album about the entire addiction experience: the descent, the overdose, the hospitalisations, the grief of losing Proof, the specific hell of trying to get clean when you are the most famous person in every room you enter. “Deja Vu” chronicles the overdose. “Beautiful” — one of the only tracks on the album recorded when he was not sober, finished after he got clean — addresses the period when he believed he had “reached rock bottom” and lost all hope for his future. He included it, he said, as a reminder to himself and “anybody who is in a dark place… that you can get out of it.”
The album received Grammy nominations. He won Best Rap Album.
Recovery (2010) went further. “Not Afraid” — his declaration of sobriety as identity, as defiance, as pride rather than shame — debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the defining songs of his career. “Going Through Changes” named his daughters explicitly: “Hailie, this one is for you, Whitney and Alaina too.”
He said something in an E! News interview about the Recovery period that I keep returning to, because it describes something about the relationship between creative work and sobriety that most people in recovery don’t have access to but that matters enormously to understanding how his recovery held: “I started treating sobriety like a superpower and I took pride in the fact that I was able to quit.”
A superpower. Not a sacrifice. Not an absence. Not the deprivation narrative that most people carry about what sobriety costs you. A gain. A capacity. Something that made him more rather than less.
This reframing — sobriety as enhancement rather than restriction — is one of the most powerful shifts in how recovery is understood in the current generation of sober public figures. Tom Holland describes it as unlocking performance capacity he didn’t know he’d been paying a tax on. Eminem describes it as a superpower. The frame is different. The underlying experience — that sobriety gives you access to yourself that the substances were quietly blocking — is exactly the same as what Bradley Cooper called “access” when he described what drugs had cost him all those years.
Not Afraid: What Seventeen Years Looks Like
On April 20, 2025, Eminem marked seventeen years of sobriety. He has marked every anniversary publicly — a sobriety chip posted to Instagram at ten years, at twelve, at sixteen. “Clean dozen, in the books! I’m not afraid,” he wrote at his twelfth anniversary, referencing the song that had announced his recovery to the world in 2010. The post received millions of likes. In the comments were thousands of people in various stages of their own recoveries, saying things like: “Congratulations, and thanks for sharing, especially to the ones trying to get through Day 1.”
He is fifty-two years old. He lives in Detroit, in the Michigan that made him, far from the Los Angeles industry life that contributed to his unravelling. He is private in the way that people who have spent years performing their interiority for public consumption sometimes become: selective, deliberate, careful about the threshold between what he shares and what he keeps. Hailie Jade is now in her late twenties, a social media influencer in her own right, publicly proud of her father. Alaina and Stevie are adults. He has given them the thing he came closest to not being able to give: a present, functional, sober father.
The memory damage from the years of Ambien is real and he has acknowledged it openly: “A lot of my memory is gone. It’s kind of a memory-eraser. That s— wiped out five years.” The prescription drug crisis that he lived through from the inside — before most of America had named it as a crisis, before the opioid epidemic became front pages and Senate hearings and public health emergencies — took something from him that he hasn’t fully recovered and possibly never will.
But he is here. He is sober. He is, by any reasonable measure, producing the best work of his career in terms of technical precision and emotional range. The rapper who couldn’t find a word to write for two years after Proof’s death has now released four albums in sobriety. He can sleep without pills. He can walk without the tubes. He can be at Christmas.
In the 2012 documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs, he said something that has since been quoted in recovery circles around the world, and that I want to close with, because it is both simple and complete: “It does get better.”
Three words. After all the verses and the freestyles and the double-time flows and the albums that split the Billboard charts down the middle. After the overdose and the tubes and the ceiling fan and the ten dealers and the grief. After the Elton John phone calls and the seventeen miles and the twelve steps and the daughters who gave him a reason to do the work that the near-death experience alone wasn’t enough to produce.
It does get better.
He would know.
The Interviews and Sources That Tell the Full Story
Eminem has documented his addiction and recovery across more than a decade of interviews, albums, and essays. These are the essential primary sources:
XXL Magazine, September 2022: His most comprehensive written account of the addiction years — the Tijuana trips, the Proof grief, the seventy-five Valium nights, the ten dealers. Essential reading.
Rolling Stone, “On the Road Back from Hell,” 2010: The first major long-form account of the recovery, given a year and a half into sobriety. The Proof quotes live here.
The New York Times, 2009: “I was the worst kind of addict, a functioning addict.” The first time he spoke at length to a major newspaper about the addiction years.
Men’s Journal, 2015: The running account, the Elton John relationship, and the post-overdose physical recovery. The most detailed record of what rebuilding looked like day-to-day.
How to Make Money Selling Drugs, documentary, 2012: The most unguarded on-camera account. “It does get better.”Watch this.
Relapse (2009) and Recovery (2010): The music is primary source material. “Deja Vu,” “Beautiful,” “Not Afraid,” “Going Through Changes” — these tracks are not metaphor. They are documentation.
If Eminem’s story sounds like yours — the functioning addict years, the gap between knowing and doing, the grief that turned a problem into a crisis — our free alcohol and drug use assessment is a starting point. Our sobriety tools and calculators can help you map what recovery might look like. The healing timeline shows what the body actually does when you stop. And if you need professional support, our addiction treatment directory covers every level of care. The door is always open — especially to the ones trying to get through Day 1.
Further reading in this series: Robert Downey Jr.’s Road to Sobriety • Bradley Cooper’s Road to Sobriety • Ryan Sheckler’s Road to Sobriety • Tom Holland’s Accidental Road to Sobriety • John Goodman and the Power of Old-School Sobriety • Why Golf Needed Anthony Kim Right Now • Laird Hamilton’s 16-Year Sobriety Story
Eminem’s Sobriety: The Full Timeline
| Year | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 1972 | Born Marshall Bruce Mathers III in St. Joseph, Missouri |
| 1995 | Daughter Hailie Jade born; working kitchen jobs for minimum wage |
| 1997 | Suicide attempt; develops Slim Shady persona |
| 1999 | The Slim Shady LP goes triple platinum; drug use begins with career |
| 2002 | 8 Mile filming; given first Ambien on set — the gateway |
| 2004 | Encore recorded mid-addiction; pills increasingly affecting his work |
| 2005 | First rehab stay; not ready, relapsed quickly |
| Apr 2006 | Best friend Proof shot and killed; drug use “goes through the roof” |
| Dec 2007 | Methadone overdose; organs shutting down; two hours from death |
| Apr 20, 2008 | Achieves lasting sobriety; begins twelve-step program |
| 2008–09 | Elton John becomes weekly phone contact; seventeen miles a day |
| May 2009 | Relapse released; Grammy for Best Rap Album |
| Jun 2010 | Recovery released; “Not Afraid” hits No. 1; Grammy for Best Rap Album |
| 2018 | Posts sobriety chip at Coachella celebrating ten years |
| 2020 | “Clean dozen” Instagram post; twelve years sober |
| 2025 | Seventeen years sober; among the most influential recovery voices in music |
Disclaimer: The content on this page is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or addiction treatment advice. If you or someone you love is struggling with substance use, please consult a qualified healthcare provider or use our addiction treatment directory to find support.
Author: Carter Davies
Music, Travel and Sobriety writer for Sober Standard. More articles can be found here and on X https://soberstandard.com/profile/carter-davies/
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