When Aaron Carter's doctor first wrote him an opioid prescription, the musician was in bad shape.
"[Aaron] got in a fight, got his jaw broken," Esquire editor David Holmes recalls in this clip from Sunday's season finale of E! True Hollywood Story. To manage the pain, Holmes explains that the now 31-year-old singer was prescribed oxycodone (a schedule II narcotic with a high risk for addiction) during recovery.
"The show always must go on," Carter tells the THS camera, emphasizing an expectation to fulfill his professional responsibilities as usual despite the complicated—and from a purely operational standpoint, very inconvenient—injury. "I had to take a pain killer to even sing," he remembers.
But what began as a serious medical treatment rapidly became a daunting health concern.
Even after his jaw had healed, Aaron continued to take oxycodone in addition to other prescription drugs. According to Dr. Drew Pinsky, returning to recreational substance abuse after receiving an opioid prescription is not an uncommon occurrence for people prone to dependency.
"If somebody's an addict and they receive opiates for legitimate reasons, they are not going to stop," notes Pinsky. "They can't. That's the nature of the disease."
Hear Aaron describe his wake-up call in the full clip above.