Addiction is never the end. It can feel like an ever-widening black hole that consumes all hope and light, but it’s a hole from which you can escape and that escape can lead you anywhere you want to go.
In this guide we’ll show you just how far recovery can take you, highlighting some cases of people who were in the deepest and darkest throes of addiction, only to escape and become incredibly famous and successful.
Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey Jr. has been around drugs all of his life and was addicted from a very young age. He was exposed to fame early on as well and had his fair share of this before he started using and while he was using, but it was after he kicked the habit that his career really look off.
While he was using the star of Iron Man lost a lot of jobs and respect within the community and only when he got clean did he begin to stitch his career back together again. Today he is one of the most successful A-listers of his generation, commanding huge sums of money to reprise his role as Iron Man for countless films set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Russell Brand
Russell Brand is a British comedian and actor who has featured in films such as Despicable Me, Get Him to the Greek and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. As a public speaker and entertainer he is very open about his former drug use, admitting to a heroin addiction that once ruled his life, but he gave all of this up in 2002, and just 2 years later he had his big break.
The clarity of sobriety was clearly very important for Brand as he would later get his first major film role in St. Trinian’s, and then become a household name. His openness about drugs and addiction, combined with his energetic and irreverent style, has led many to assume that Brand is still a drug user, but it’s actually his abstinence from drugs that has made him the man he is today.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah is one of the most successful women in the United States. She has built a media empire that has earned her a net worth in the billions of dollars, and she continues to stake a claim as being one of the most powerful women in the country. But she had a very troubled past, one littered with abuse and poverty. In her twenties she was also a habitual use of crack cocaine, something she admitted to in the 1990s.
She claimed to have been “addicted” to her boyfriend, a heavy drug user at the time and one who introduced her to drugs and to a dangerous and destructive lifestyle. It didn’t last though. She kicked her addiction to him and to the drugs and she went on to build an unparalleled media empire.
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson is one of the biggest names in Hollywood and has featured in a host of classic films, from the viral Snakes on a Plane to the Hateful Eight and more. But the actor’s early life was filled with addiction. He admitted to using heroin in his youth, before switching to crack after too many overdoses and too many scares.
He was eventually admitted into rehab in 1991, during which time he gave up the drugs and focused more on his acting. He had appeared in several TV movies and one-off TV episodes until that point, but when he sobered up his career really began to take off. A few years later he secured the most impotent role of his career to date, Pulp Fiction, and since then he has become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, with his films grossing nearly $10 billion.
From Addiction to Sobriety to Recovery
The beauty of recovery is that clarity appears immediately and if you begin to make positive changes then they will be reflected immediately as well. You don’t necessarily need to wait for the long haul and whether you’re 90 days sober or 2 years sober, if you endeavor to make positive changes then you will begin to feel the benefits immediately.
