Jamie Lee Curtis Reveals She Had An Opioid Addiction For 10 Years: ‘No One Knew’

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis is getting candid about a very difficult time in her life. In a new interview with People, the Halloween star revealed she had a 10-year-long opioid addiction that began in the 1980s.

“I was ahead of the curve of the opiate epidemic,” Jamie, 59, shared. “I had a 10-year run, stealing, conniving. No one knew. No one.”

She was prescribed opiates for the first time in 1989 after getting mild plastic surgery for her “hereditary puffy eyes.” Jamie subsequently became addicted to them and spent the next decade getting them however she could: even if it meant stealing them from her closest friends and family.

Addiction ran in Jamie’s family before her own. Her father, Tony Curtis, abused alcohol, cocaine, and heroin, and her half-brother, Nicholas Curtis, died from a heroin overdose in 1994. It was her older sister, Kelly, who first learned of Jamie’s battle in 1998, four years after Nicholas’ death.

Just one year later in 1999, Jamie attended her first recovery meeting. “In recovery meetings, anyone who brings up opiates, the entire room will turn and look at me, because I’ll be like, ‘Oh here, talk to me. I’m the opiate girl,'” she shared.

It was that same day that she started recovery when she told her husband of 33 years, Christopher Guest, about her issue. The two are parents to two kids, Annie, 31, and Tom, 22. “She’s gone through it all. She says that she’s a tough broad,” an insider once told Closer Weekly of Jamie’s tough times. And now that she’s been sober for 18 years, “She puts her sobriety front and center,” the source added. “She wants to be a good example to her kids and other young people.”

Jamie shared today: “I’m breaking the cycle that has basically destroyed the lives of generations in my family. Getting sober remains my single greatest accomplishment… bigger than my husband, bigger than both of my children and bigger than any work, success, failure. Anything.” You go, girl!