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| Dennis Quaid |
"Coming from where I came from - lower-middle-class life, from Houston into Hollywood - and all of a sudden this success starts happening to you, I just didn't know how to handle that," he wrote.
"Doing blow just contributed to me not being able to handle the fame, which, at the time, I guess I felt I didn't deserve," he said.
Quaid described his "casual" introduction to the narcotic by explaining it was the party drug of choice at Hollywood's swankiest bashes.
"That's what people were doing..." he wrote. "Instead of having a cocktail, you'd have a line."
And the party didn't stop when the cameras rolled on set.
"Cocaine was even in the budgets of movies, thinly disguised," Quaid said. "It was petty cash, you know? It was supplied, basically, on movie sets because everyone was doing it."
The star of several 1980s movies, including "Jaws 3-D" and "Dreamscape," Quaid said he was a "mess" by the time he started filming 1987's "The Big Easy."
"I'd wake up, snort a line, and swear I wasn't going to do it again that day," he recalled. "But then 4 o'clock rolled around, and I'd be right back down the same road like a little squirrel on one of those treadmills."
He was getting just one hour of sleep a night and his acting started to slip as a result. But it wasn't until his band, the Eclectics, broke up in the late 1980s that he realized it was time to get some help.
"I had one of those white-light experiences that night where I kind of realized I was going to be dead in five years if I didn't change my ways," he wrote. "The next day I was in rehab."
Quaid spent two years getting clean, and said the time "gave me the resolve and resilience to persevere in life."
"If I hadn't gone through that period, I don't know if I'd still be acting," he said. "In the end, it taught me humility. I really learned to appreciate what I have in this life."
The actor has mostly kept quiet about his brother Randy's increasing legal woes.
The elder Quaid, 60, has been on the run since he skipped court in October, failing to appear in connection to a vandalism incident. His wife, Evi, was granted Canadian citizenship in February, effectively ending an extradition attempt.
"I love my brother and I miss my brother," Quaid told People.com recently. "That's all I'm going to say."
Sources: http://www.nydailynews.com
