Jackson Browne talks about Drugs, Enabling and His Regrets

Some of you may know that I have a blog about Classic Rock music.  I was recently sent an interview with Jackson Browne to link on my site but I thought I'd cut and paste part of it here, its interesting that he never became an addict but talks about being an enabler and how devastating drugs and alcohol were to some of his loved ones. I admire his honesty.

Q: For years you ran with people who abused drugs and alcohol pretty intensely—Warren Zevon, Nico, David Crosby. Yet at 61 you seem unscathed.

A: No, I wouldn't say unscathed. Anybody that has alcoholism in their family is not unscathed, believe me. It doesn't even have to be a matter of your own drug-taking, but your enabling of others. In many ways you could say I enabled Warren. I've lost people to drugs—it didn't keep me from taking drugs, either. There were occasions when I couldn't died. I played around with all the drugs.

Q: You did?

A: Oh, yeah. But everybody did. You have to understand. You were just as likely to encounter somebody with a bag of heroin as a bag full of mescaline caps. I mean, it was just sort of back and forth that way, and eventually I sort of made a choice. But I didn't ever get addicted to heroin. I just stupidly, stupidly fooled around—in a way that endangered not only myself but others. I mean, like, at one point I shot up a friend of mine—and we realized with some horror that it was too much. We spent the next several hours trying to make sure that he, you know—I'm laughing about it now just out of a sense of outrage. The outrage that passed across his face. And he's such a good friend. I think he's permitting me to laugh about it, but in fact it was a horrible thing. Another time somebody passed me something that I assumed was coke in an airport. We were on our way to a concert, and I went into the restroom and was a bit greedy and I came out and I was like, "What is this shit?" And I sort of covered my mouth. We had to leave the airport and go to a hotel. It was heroin. I thought it was coke and it was heroin. Look, I'm telling you stuff that I would tell anybody if it was important to understand that you can definitely be in over your head and not know it. I count myself lucky that I didn't grow to like heroin. It's not something that really worked for me. On the other hand, there were other drugs that did. I began thinking that cocaine was really useful, and I began using alcohol because I never understood how uncomfortable I was in groups of people that were there for me—I started drinking when I started performing. At this point I don't take any drugs, and I don't think it helps. With the exception of some psychedelic drugs—I think that's helpful information, for me. But the people I took drugs with, many of them are dead now. I miss Lowell George every day. And a lot of my friends had to get sober or die—Warren Zevon created an incredible body of work because he was sober, not because he was out of his mind and berserk.

If you're interested in the entire interview its here

Peace, Hope and Love,
Barbara