Former Jackass star recalled snorting cocaine tainted with the blood of an HIV-positive drug user in a recent interview this week.
The 44-year-old, whose real name is Stephen Gilchrist Glover, sat down with sportscaster Graham Bensinger to discuss his battles with addiction on Bensinger’s In Depth show Wednesday.
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In the clip Bensinger released, Steve-O said he probably had his first drink before he turned 11. He said his mother was an alcoholic and might have given him alcohol when he was “pretty young” to keep him quiet on a plane.
Steve-O also recalled how his family had a tradition where all the kids, no matter what their age, could have an alcoholic beverage on New Year’s Eve.
“I think I remember having alcohol on New Year’s Eve when I was 8 or 9,” the Dr. Steve-O star said. “I would have like a beer or something. And the idea was that if you let the kid have that… I mean, whatever they were going to do, it was going to blow up in their faces.”
Steve-O said he did not fault anyone for what they did in “trying to manage me as a child.”
Bensinger asked the reality star if he could name all the drugs he used over the years, but instead Steve-O listed his “favorites,” including cocaine, PCP, marijuana and Valium. He recalled at one point drinking aluminum cleaner, which brought about “disturbing incidents.”
Next, Bensinger asked about Steve-O’s experience with a HIV-positive drug dealer who injected cocaine instead of snorting it. The man also had his own blood squirted around his house.
“This one time when I showed up and uh, he was in his bedroom passed out โฆ I couldn’t wake him up โฆ over at the table, where he would weigh out all of his drugs, there was, uh, ya know, a very noticeable residue of cocaine,” Steve-O recalled. “I went over to this table to scrape up a pile of cocaine to snort it, but as I had sat down looking at it, there was, of course, blood had been squirted โฆ you could see, like, the little tiny little blood splatter, ya know, on the residue.”
Even though he knew the blood was there, Steve-O said he still snorted the cocaine.
“This is how desperate and pathetic my addiction was, that I sat there, like, knowingly scraping up this tainted, like, blood cocaine and uh, I sat there and snorted it, which is so fโ up – I snorted the blood of an intravenous drug user.”
Steve-O said he did not contract HIV from the blood, since the virus does not live long in dried blood.
The comedian has been sober since 2008. On March 10, 2018, he celebrated 10 years sober and is now engaged to girlfriend Lux Wright.
“Hard to believe it’s been an entire decade since I’ve had a drink or a drug,” Steve-O tweeted. “I just can’t put into words how grateful I am for [Jackass co-star Johnny Knoxville] and the rest of the guys who locked me up in a psychiatric ward on March 9, 2008, where this journey began. Thank you, dudes, I love you.”
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