For a lot of people, going to university is an excuse to get wasted and take drugs all the time. The trick is to be really careful. Drugs are great fun and all that but they can also make you crazy, broke, suicidal and ruin all your inter-personal relationships. Then you have to live on the streets and eat burgers out of bins. Then you die. Like Peter Doherty (above), comedian Russell Brand was a huge drug addict. It got him fired from every job he ever had and now he has to make do with presenting that annoying Big Brother aftershow programme. Which is arguably worse than living in a cardboard box.
Vice: What was the main factor in deciding to become a human toilet?
Russell Brand: If you made a trajectory of my life it would go like this: I was a child, I was a drug addict and, well, that only ended two years ago.
I was a drug addict for about ten years. So that’s the majority of all my adult life that’s been profusely influenced by the pursuit and the procurement and consumption of drugs. If you’re using drugs as I was, it can’t help but influence every area of your life. It would effect people’s perceptions of me because I was of course working and performing on drugs. I was taking drugs, literally on stage. I was very used to doing it when I was working on television.
Is it true you once smoked so much crack you went into the MTV offices dressed as Osama Bin Laden on September 12?
Well, I probably wouldn’t have done that with a straight head. I didn’t really care about much at that time, except for showing off, being stupid and mucking around. I think I’m quite glad that it happened though; it’s something to be talked about retrospectively. But in the words of Morrissey, “I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible.” It’s like Marianne Faithfull says, without heroin she would have killed herself. There’s so much torment, pain and misery that it’s nice to have something to relax with and take your mind off things. I don’t think it makes you a better performer, I think I’m much better without it. If you haven’t got a clear head, you can’t write, you can’t develop ideas and your mates think you’re a selfish wanker.
How did an indie boy get into being a crackhouse regular?
It started off with me smoking grass, but there was always a little inkling that this wasn’t quite enough. There are plenty of people that can do these things without a hold upon them. They can think, well it might be nice to smoke a bit a grass now and again. But when I smoked it, I had to smoke it all the time. When I drank, I had to drink all the time. There is a great piece by this Australian comic Steve Hughes where he’s talking about when you and your friends first took acid, and most people were like, “Wow this is great”, but how there was always one that thought, “I wanna do this all the time”. That’s what I was like. I mean, acid is all right but you shouldn’t have it all the time. I was like that with Es and then speed, then coke. I call it “My Nan’s Kilroy Drug Helter Skelter”, because one day when I was smoking grass in my Nan’s living room, she asked, “Is that drugs?” And I said, “No Nan, it’s not drugs, it opens your mind”. Trying to do some kind of The Doors, Jim Morrison thing. But my Nan just turns round and says, “No, that is drugs and you wanna be careful, I’ve seen it on Kilroy, it leads to worse things.” So when you see those adverts saying, “If you end up smoking grass, you’ll become a heroin addict.” That actually happened to me. But there is a frightening statistic about the Vietnam war. All the soldiers were issued opiates, basically heroin, while they were out there, and when they returned 90 per cent just kicked the habit. But there was 10 per cent that just continued their addiction, because they had that addictive tendency. I’ve got that tendency. Even when I was a kid, I had to have all the fucking Penguins, I’d eat the green one, the blue one, the red one, until I had eaten all the bloody Penguins. And it is probably something to do with that search for adoration that brings you round to something like acting. I think if you have that tendency inside you, it can be easily awoken.
Do you remember the first time you scored heroin?
Yeah, the first time I took heroin I was in Hackney, and I saw these two twelve-year-old Turkish boys and they were skinning up a joint with heroin. And I’d never taken heroin at that time, I was 19, and I went over to them and said, “Oh is that heroin?” And they said, “Yeah.” And so I asked if I could have some, and I’ll never forget the picture of their little faces looking up at me and one just saying, “You ’aven’t done this before ’ave ya?” I was like, “No I ain’t, nah.” It was frightening. He was way cooler than me. So he probably sold me about 2 quid’s worth for a tenner. I went home and did it off foil in my girlfriend’s bathroom and just loved it. It was like this amazing warmth. It was like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, that’s beautiful!” The first time I did crack was with a homeless girl in a phone box. I gave her a fiver for hit on her “machine”, as they call it. It was just opportunist, ’cos my mind was open to it. Then I did it a few more times in between, but it wasn’t until I started working for MTV that I started having more money than sense, and started doing it all the time. I found a reliable dealer. Well, as reliable as dealers get.
I didn’t realise I was an addict until I’d been regularly using for a few months. I went to stay with my girlfriend in Ibiza, who didn’t condone me taking drugs. I’d be lying in bed, and my legs are starting to kick out. That’s where the term “kicking the habit” comes from. But then I’d be in bed realising that the reason I’m getting that feeling in my legs is because I haven’t used. So I’d have to go to the toilet and use, and the feeling melts away. And you realise, I’m addicted to this now.
How addictive are the rituals?
It’s a whole way of life. Every element of it. Even the way that heroin is distributed around London’s West End. There’s guys that go round on bikes called “runners”. So you have to find one of them, but they’re only in certain places at certain times. And they have to keep on changing their routes. Then when you find one, they stash it in their mouth and they have to cough it up into their hand and you have to put it in your mouth. So there is this whole unsavoury but fascinating subculture surrounding it. I used to go to some of the most horrible places and met with some really dangerous people. It really is amazing that I didn’t get hurt at some point. I’d be there wearing my frilly shirt and baggy jeans, hanging around with people who carry their sleeping bags on their shoulders. It was totally ridiculous. I’m just surprised that I didn’t get in more trouble than I did. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on gravy granuals, and Ajax and other dried household substances. I’ve ended up in the worst crack houses imaginable in Camden, waiting for a dealer to come home.
Did you have any good times?
It all just kind of blurs into one. It’s all very disjointed and fragmented. So no, I can’t really think of one best time. An amazing high would be mirrored by waking up not knowing where I am, surrounded by strangers, not knowing how on earth I got there. I remember I was doing a show called Ibiza On One with Tess Daley. And we’d come down for breakfast at the hotel in the morning, and I’d be sat in the lobby smoking heroin while everyone sat around having their eggs on toast.
Was Tess aware of what was going on?
Yeah, Tess was very sweet. She’d be like, “What the fuck are you doing this for?” It was the same with everyone. They all knew, but just didn’t understand. And that was when I started losing work from it. I got sacked off XFM, I got sacked off MTV. I didn’t seem to have any ability to control it.
Could you spell out why not to do heroin or crack?
I don’t really think you can, mate. I think if people need to do it, they will. If you don’t have the ability to tolerate hard drugs, it will literally chew you up and spit you out. Hopefully then there’s someone there to pick up your partly masticated entrails and put you back together. I think for a lot of people it’s just a right laugh. The reason I’ve stopped doing them is because my life is better off without it.
JAIMIE HODGSON
