In an interview with Fast Company, the ‘80s rocker and former addict says the Trump administration should put more emphasis on treatment.
By Melissa Locker 01.11.18
Mötley Crüe was a hard-rocking band, and Nikki Sixx, the bassist and cofounder, may have been the hardest rocker of them all. He chronicled it all in his New York Times best-selling memoir The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star. To call it a tell-all is an understatement—some of the stories and photos were so raw and graphic that they even gave Sixx pause.
“There are some diary entries that I asked the publisher, like are you guys sure you want all of this?” said Sixx. “But it is real.”
The book graphically details his spiral into an addiction that quite literally killed him. “For two minutes in 1987 I was pronounced clinically dead from an overdose,” he wrote in a powerful op-ed in the Los Angeles Times earlier this year.
Ten years after it was published, Sixx’s book is still a must-read, but not just for metal heads seeking dirt about the hard-rock scene. In the context of America’s opioid epidemic, it serves as a manual for understanding the realities of a public-health crisis that killed more than 42,000 people in 2016.
While Sixx has many things on his plate—photography, developing a musical based on The Heroin Diaries, writing music with his band Sixx:A.M.—he has recently become a vocal spokesperson on ways to combat opioid addiction. He’s lived it, after all. In addition to the op-ed, he has called on President Trump to follow through on the White House’s interim report, which urged a greater focus on treatment for addicts, education about pain management for doctors, and called out the drug manufacturers for their role in the crisis.
Check out the interview here: https://www.fastcompany.com/40512916/motley-crues-nikki-sixx-has-hard-earned-ideas-for-battling-the-opioid-crisis