Dennis Quaid Opens Up About Doing A Lot Of Cocaine, Was “Screaming At God”

Dennis Quaid is more down to clown than many might have expected, and apparently in the 80’s was doing cocaine on a daily basis. While the details of his extracurricular activities stop at the blow, context clues tell us that if someone was doing this much cocaine in the 80’s, they were definitely also neck-deep in dead hooker bodies and consistently bloodied from smashing their fists through mirrors in fits of blissful rage. Just trying to paint a picture. Basically, he was cool. What happened? Here’s what Quaid had to say about his cocaine addiction on Today:

I grew up in the ’60s and the ’70s and there was a completely different attitude about [drugs] back then. It was even in some movie budgets. I kept roaring on. [I] was basically doing cocaine pretty much on a daily basis during the 80s.

I spent many, many a night screaming at God to please take this away from me. [I said], ‘I’ll never do it again because I’ve only got an hour before I have to be at work. At about four o’clock in the afternoon I would go, ‘That’s not so bad.’

Now instead of working cocaine into movie budgets, producers work in kidney transplants. Crazy how the industry has changed. To be fair, the cocaine craze in the 80’s happened before the ubiquity of coffee shops ushered in by Starbucks in the 90’s, so really, you can’t knock Quaid until you know what it’s like to have easier accessibility to blow than coffee before a long day on the job. America runs on dunkin’ your face into a pile of cocaine. But Quaid was able to stop doing coke before he joined to Dead Cokehead Celebs Club:

I had what I call a ‘white light experience’ where I saw myself either dead or losing everything that meant anything to me.

Thankfully the only thing that Quaid lost was his career. Who else is going to rewatch Jaws 3D knowing what we know now?

Photo Credit: Dennis and Kimberly Quaid from Splash News, Universal Pictures / Backgrid USA