Lisa Marie Presley Says She’s ‘Grateful to Be Alive’ Following Opioid Addiction

Lisa Marie Presley is opening up about her opioids addiction, as the issue takes center stage during her divorce proceedings.

After years of barely mentioning her issues with drugs in public, Elvis Presley’s daughter shared intimate details about her problems with addiction in a foreword for the book The United States of Opioids: A Prescription for Liberating a Nation in Pain by Harry Nelson.

In the essay, Presley said she is “grateful to be alive today,” Yahoo News first reported.

“You may read this and wonder how, after losing people close to me, I also fell prey to opioids,” the 51-year-old wrote, whose father had an opioid addiction and ex-husband Michael Jackson died of an overdose.

She continued, “I was recovering after the [2008] birth of my daughters, Vivienne and Finley, when a doctor prescribed me opioids for pain. It only took a short-term prescription of opioids in the hospital for me to feel the need to keep taking them.”

Presley has previously kept her addiction issues private, however details of the difficult period in her life were made public in paperwork related to her ongoing divorce from her fourth husband, musician Michael Lockwood.

She described it in the foreword as “a difficult path to overcome this dependence, and to put my life back together. Even in recent years, I have seen too many people I loved struggle with addiction and die tragically from this epidemic. It is time for us to say goodbye to shame about addiction. We have to stop blaming and judging ourselves and the people around us… That starts with sharing our stories.”

Presley admitted she was hesitant of writing about her issues at first.

“I had never openly spoken in public about my own addiction to opioids and painkillers,” she wrote. “I wasn’t sure that I was ready to share on such a personal topic.”

However, she decided to open up in order to help other people who are struggling with their sobriety.

“Across America and the world, people are dying in mind-boggling numbers because of opioid and other drug overdoses,” she continued. “Many more people are suffering silently, addicted to opioids and other substances. I am writing this in the hope that I can play a small part in focusing attention on this terrible crisis. I experienced firsthand how hard it is to cut through all of the bad information out there to get help. We all need to educate ourselves and the people around us on the dangers of opioids and other drugs, and understand what we can do to keep ourselves and the people we love safe…. Acknowledging that we are all at risk is not a measure of weakness, but of honesty.”

The singer mentioned her children, Riley Keough, 30; Benjamin Keough, 26, and two 10-year-old twins, as the reason for her sobriety.

“As I write this, I think of my four children, who gave me the purpose to heal,” she wrote after considering “the countless parents who have lost children to opioids and other drugs.”

“[I’m] grateful to be alive today… and to have four beautiful children who have given me a sense of purpose that has carried me through dark times,” she added.