Desiree Navarro/WireImageSteve-O has come a long way from some of his darkest times.
The Jackass alum, who is approaching his 11th anniversary of sobriety, reflected on the depths of his addictions during a recent interview for In Depth with Graham Bensinger.
During the interview, the 44-year-old star recalled his beginnings with alcohol, claiming that his mother would give him "just a little booze" on planes to stop him from crying and that his parents would allow him and his siblings a drink on New Year's Eve. According to him, he had drank before 12 years old. In addition to alcohol, the star shared all the different types of drugs he took before his recovery began in the late 2000s.
"My favorites were Ketamine, cocaine, nitrous oxide, PCP, of course marijuana, alcohol. Oh, I loved Xanax so much, and Valium," he recalled. "Never got too into meth, but I never turned it down. Had some pretty terrible experiences on magic mushrooms. Had a lot of great experience on LSD. Like, random, weird stuff. I huffed video head cleaner. There was this weird episode where I was drinking aluminum cleaner...and that would bring about some pretty disturbing incidents."
A particularly desperate moment came when Steve-O paid a visit to his drug dealer and ultimately snorted cocaine laced with the dealer's HIV-positive blood.
"I had this drug dealer, he lived very close by. I had him in my phone as his first name and then 'Everything' as a pseudo last name [because he would say], 'I got everything,'" he remembered. "I would go over to Everything's house if he didn't answer my call… Sometimes I would show up and he'd be there and sell me my drugs. Sometimes I would show up and the door would be locked and it was like 'F--k.' And then there were sometimes where I would show up and the door would be unlocked but he would be, like, passed out, 'cause he was very much a drug user as well as a dealer."
As Steve-O explained, the dealer would inject cocaine and the process would lead him to squirt blood all over the place with his syringe. "This one time when I showed up and he was in his bedroom passed out. He wasn't dead, but I couldn't wake him up," he continued. "Over at the table, where he would weigh out all of his drugs, there was a very noticeable residue of cocaine just from the volume of cocaine."
The star continued, "I went over to the table to scrape up a pile of cocaine to snort it, but as I had sat down looking at it, there was, of course, blood had been squirted. You could see the little tiny little blood splatter on the residue."
"This is how just desperate and pathetic my addiction was, that I sat there knowingly scraping up this tainted, like, blood cocaine and I sat there and snorted it, which is so f--ked up," Steve-O said. "I snorted the blood of an intravenous drug user."
Fortunately, Steve-O did not contract the virus, possibly because the blood had been dry. "All these years later," he said, "and I just don't have it."