Billy Idol admits smoking crack cocaine to get off heroin addiction

Billy Idol started smoking crack to kick his heroin addiction, and spoiler alert, it worked.

During an appearance “Club Random with Bill Maher” The idol admitted that using drugs allowed him to stop using heroin.

“When you try to get off heroin, where do you go? You go to something else. I started smoking crack to quit heroin,” Idol said.

“Did you really do that?” Maher asked, and Idol laughed and replied, “It worked. It worked.”

The 70-year-old rock legend opened up about his career and the bad boy attitudes that nearly cost him his music career and his life in the new documentary “Billy Idol Should Be Dead.”

“I had everything and I burned it with butane,” he said New York Times.

While building his successful career, Idol took many risks with his life, struggling with his heroin addiction while also speeding through the streets on his motorcycle, driving very fast and saying, “I’m so lucky.”

In an interview with Associated Press In April 2025, Idol shared that the rock and roll lifestyle “embraced drugs” and that he took his first hit of acid when he was 12 years old. “There was a point in my life where I was very addicted to drugs,” he added, later admitting how lucky he was to be alive.

“Where do you go when you want to quit heroin? You go to something else. I started smoking crack to get off heroin.”

—Billy Idol

“I’m lucky to keep the brain that I have, because some people are brain dead and some people end up in prison forever. Or they die,” he told the outlet. “Imagine if it were today. If I had been doing what I’m doing back then, I would have died from exposure to fentanyl.”

While speaking to the New York Times, Idol’s longtime guitarist Steve Stevens explained that he “learned a lot” while watching the documentary, including how bad his addiction was at the time, explaining in the documentary that much of his bad behavior was hidden from the public at the time.

After parting ways with his UK group Generation X, Idol moved to the United States in 1981 to try and find success as a solo artist. As his popularity grew, so did his drug use. Accordingly PeopleThe Idol opened up about the near-fatal overdose he suffered in 1984 when he returned to England to celebrate the success of his second album, “Rebel Yell.”

Idol moved to the United States in 1981 and began his solo career. (Brian D. McLaughlin/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

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“I was coming back victorious and I almost blew it,” he said in the documentary. “We flew to London and met a lot of the friends we knew here. They had some of the strongest heroin. Everyone did a line or two and they all nodded except me and this friend.”

He recalled friends putting him in an “ice cold bath” and later helping him around the roof of his building, adding: “I was literally dying. I was turning blue.”

On Maher’s podcast, Idol told the story of returning to England after the success of his 1983 album “Rebel Yell” and turning blue after shooting heroin with some friends.

Billy Idol in 1995. (Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

“We finally passed out and I was turning blue when the other people in the room came too,” the idol said. Maher asked why he turned blue after performing a heroic act, and Idol said that’s what happens when he dies.

“If you die, you’ll start turning blue,” the idol said.

The idol shared that he has only injected heroin into his system “a few times” but prefers to snort it.

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In addition to his drug use, the “White Wedding” singer’s wild behavior on his motorcycle cost him career opportunities. A motorcycle accident in 1990 that nearly cost the singer his leg forced him to turn down a role in the “Terminator” sequel because it involved more running than he was capable of.

“In a way, I’ve always flirted with death. I even ride a motorcycle, “You’re looking at concrete,” he told The Associated Press. “That’s where you can come out of that thing and make a terrible mess. And that’s what I did. It’s terrible. You discover how human you are, how vulnerable you are. There’s a lot of things about my life that, yes, I called death sometimes. I didn’t really mean it that way, but that’s just how you lived.”

The idol had a serious motorcycle accident in 1990 that nearly cost him his leg. (Angelo Deligio/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

The Idol became a parent in the late 1980s, first welcoming son Willem, 37, with girlfriend Perri Lister in 1988, and then daughter Bonnie, 36, with girlfriend Linda Mathis in 1989.

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The motorcycle accident, combined with becoming a parent, led Idol to rethink his lifestyle, telling The New York Times: “Something was telling me he couldn’t do this forever.”

“I started thinking that I should really try to move forward, not be a drug addict anymore and things like that,” he said. People In May 2024. “It took a long time, but little by little I reached a kind of discipline and I’m not the guy I was in the ’80s anymore. I’m not the same drug addict.”

Idol now considers himself a “California sober.” He told Maher he sometimes took “marijuana pills” but had not taken a dose of cocaine in 20 years.

“Billy Idol Should Be Dead” premiered at the Tribeca Festival on June 10 and was released widely on Thursday, February 26.

His motorcycle accident and becoming a parent led him to sober up. (Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for the Recording Academy)

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