We all know that drug addiction is no joke, and its a good thing that Lamar Odom can open up about his past problems and his life.
In an essay for The Players’ Tribune, Odom shared the first time he used crack, that crack became a coping mechanism in a string of deaths of people close to him, and that it really triggered after the death of his son. At the age of 12, Odom’s mother passed away from Colon cancer, something he never truly got over, but used his grandmother and basketball to deal with everything. At the age of 24, Odom tried coke for the first time, his reasoning? Nothing at all. A choice he regrets tremendously.
“Right around that same time, my grandmother passed away,” Odom recalled. “I lost a lot of family members in a short period of time. When I did coke, I felt good for a minute. I stopped having so much anxiety. I didn’t think about the pain. I didn’t think about death. So I kept doing it more and more, but I was still in control. It wasn’t like an everyday thing.”
“About two years [after I started doing coke], I got a phone call that changed my life. It was the summer of 2006. I had been out partying all night, and I hadn’t gone home,” Odom recalled.
You can watch the entire video recollection below, and read the full essay here: “What’s Done In The Dark”