‘My doctor told me those mysterious new pills were methadone, which is used to wean heroin addicts off dope. Had I known it was methadone, I probably wouldn’t have taken it. But as bad as I was back then, I can’t even say 100 percent for sure. My doctor told me the amount of methadone I’d taken was equivalent to shooting up four bags of heroin. Even when they told me I almost died, it didn’t click.’ After detoxing, Eminem suffered a knee injury that required surgery, but because of his recent drug abuse, he was not prescribed painkillers. He recalls, ‘I started looking around my house to see if I had a stash box of Vicodin…I’m ransacking my house, finally find something in the basement, in a little napkin, seven and a half Vicodin—the big extra strength ones—and a few Valium.’ The rapper soon relapsed for the second time and finally admitted to himself he was an addict. ‘It never once hit me that drug addiction runs in my family. Now that I understand that I’m an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it.’ ”

“ ‘I wanted to make an overall statement—I’m back. It was a slow process. You gotta remember I hadn’t recorded a song sober in seven years. So it took me awhile to even feel like I could record a song sober…I don’t know the last time I shot a video sober, without drinking or taking anything. It’s been years.” He continues, ‘I almost feel like a little kid again with rap. I wanna play around with different flows. If I don’t feel like it’s what I’m fully capable of, if there’s one weak line, I wanna change it. Rap was my drug. It used to get me high and then it stopped getting me high. Then I had to resort to other things to make me feel that…now rap’s getting me high again.’”