Videos by According2HipHop
Eminem is pulling back the curtain on one of the darkest chapters of his life.
In his new documentary Stans, the Detroit rapper lays out the brutal truth about his years hooked on prescription pills—Vicodin, Valium, Ambien, Xanax—and the 2008 overdose that nearly ended his life.
“I got into this vicious cycle of, ‘I’m depressed so I need more pills,’” Eminem says in the film. “Then your tolerance gets so high that you end up overdosing. I woke up in the hospital and I didn’t know what happened. I woke up with tubes in me and s–t and I couldn’t get up, I wanted to move.”
The breaking point wasn’t just waking up in a hospital—it was realizing he’d missed his daughter Hailie Jade McClintock’s guitar recital. “I cried because it was like, ‘Oh my god, I missed that,’” he says. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Do you want to f–king miss this again? Do you want to miss everything? If you can’t do it for yourself… at least do it for them.’”
Recovery meant starting over. “I had to relearn how to walk, talk—and for the most part—relearn how to rap again,” he admits, adding that his writing had “gotten terrible.” But once his skills returned, so did his pride in sobriety. “I started treating sobriety like a superpower and I took pride in the fact that I was able to quit.”
Fifteen years later, Em’s story in Stans lands as a raw reminder of how close he came to losing everything—and why he refuses to go back.
