Thursday/No Devotion frontman Geoff Rickly has newly spoken at length about his struggles with and eventual recovery from opiate and heroin addiction in a new feature over at The Ties That Bind Us. The piece finds Rickly detailing his experiences with addiction as they unfolded throughout the height of much of Thursday‘s career.
He wasn’t introduced to drugs due to his profession however, as he revealed that he was first prescribed opiates after breaking his arm as a teenager, offering:
“They gave me heavy opiate painkillers, and I had a moment with my family while we were watching ‘Malcolm X,’ the Spike Lee movie, and I was so high I started saying, ‘I want to be a Black Panther!’ My parents were just laughing, because I was obviously messed up, but I just felt so connected to everyone. I felt like I was in the brotherhood of man, like, ‘This is what other people feel — that connection. They love each other!’ And that never stopped for me with opiates until I was deep into a $300 a day heroin habit and still didn’t feel that.”
It wasn’t until somewhere around 2012 that he realized the extent of his addiction, stating:
“I had the experience of by the time I had crossed the line, I realized I was miles over it, just way out over the cliff. “My marriage fell apart around the same time the band broke up (around 2012), and I just kind of got in a real dark place and got real depressed for a while. I kept using, and then one day I got held up at gunpoint, and one of the things the guy got was a huge bottle of opiates.
The next day I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t actually go without these.’ I had fooled myself into thinking these were things I was doing for fun, because I always had money or pills, and then suddenly, I didn’t, and I was going through withdrawal. I knew a guy who would front me some heroin, and I thought, ‘I’ll do it long enough to get straight and then get out of it.’
So I did it, but it wasn’t as strong. The heroin wasn’t as strong. That’s when I realized that every day, I had been taking more than enough opiates to equal several bags of heroin.”
After several attempts at recovery, he finally found the determination to kick, aided in part traditional 12 step programs and an experience with Ibogaine treatment in Mexico that helped him visualize his addiction. He said of that experience:
“I was a low-bottom addict. I wasn’t just a cool guy in a band who used drugs; I was a low-bottom, losing-everything, strung-the-fuck-out junkie. It was harsh to see myself that way, but in some ways, it was helpful, because it was extremely humbling, ego-death type of experience. I just knew that after that, I was going to try every meeting, whether it was 12 Step, SMART Recovery or whatever. If there was somebody who swore by it, I was going to try it.”
There’s far more to read from Rickly on his experiences with drug abuse on the road, his various battles against addiction and how he managed to finally pull himself together and begin repairing the relationships he fractured in the past over at The Ties That Bind Us.
In other news, both Thursday and No Devotion recently signed with No Velocity Records with Thursday lining up reissues and live albums, while No Devotion have a new full-length album in the works.
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