Profiles Of Addiction Recovery | Stevie Nicks

There’s no shortage of stars who can speak to the prevalence of cocaine abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, and Billboard-charting American songstress Stevie Nicks is no exception.

In fact, the Fleetwood Mac singer and solo artist has on several occasions spoken openly about her long and storied experiences with cocaine and prescription drug use, and the impact her eventual recovery had on her life and her career.

Stevie Nicks’ Stardom & Cocaine Addiction

Stephanie “Stevie” Nicks would join her first band, The Changing Times, while attending her California high school before partnering (romantically and musically) with guitarist and vocalist Lindsey Buckingham and taking over as the lead singer of the psychedelic rock band, Fritz.

Dropping out of college, Nicks would go with Fritz to open for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1968 and 1970. By 1973 the band broke up. Nicks was working multiple jobs, and she and Buckingham were experimenting with cocaine.

In 1975 Buckingham and Nicks were invited by Mick Fleetwood to join his band, Fleetwood Mac, and worldwide success rapidly followed.

However, with success came trouble, as Nicks would later recount. Along with the increasing physical and mental toll of cocaine use, Nicks and Buckingham would break up, and Nicks and Fleetwood would strike up a short-lived affair despite Fleetwood being married with children.

Damaging Effects

Nicks continued using cocaine, along with her bandmates, well into the 1980s. 

What once started as a way to relax and prepare to take the stage grew into something far darker. In fact, the amount of cocaine she was snorting to maintain her manic, rock star lifestyle burned away the tissue under the bridge of Nick’s nose and she began suffering from frequent blackouts.

Visiting a plastic surgeon for an opinion, Nicks was told that, due to the tissue loss, if she did another hit of cocaine there was a chance that she could have a brain hemorrhage, collapse, and die. 

As Nicks herself has since remarked, “All of us were drug addicts, but there was a point where I was the worst drug addict. I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke. And I had that hole in my nose. So, it was dangerous.”

But even then Nicks was unsure, eventually confessing that her thoughts turned to her fallen inspirations Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. “I saw how they went down, and a part of me wanted to go down with them.”

Nevertheless, in 1985 Nicks would contact a professional drug rehab center and check into a thirty-day inpatient rehab stay—a move she has since credited with saving her life.

Rehab & Cocaine Addiction Recovery

At rehab, Nicks was forced to follow a highly regimented daily schedule, waking at 6am and spending long hours in therapy sessions both alone and with the other participants.

And yet, according to Nicks, the most important thing she learned was how to slow down, to stop going non-stop and fueling herself with drugs and work.

In 2007, Nicks would recount an exercise where she was told to write an essay on the difference between Stevie Nicks the rockstar and Stevie Nicks the human being. It was, she has since claimed, one of the hardest things she ever had to do.

Stevie Nicks’ Klonopin Addiction

Unfortunately, Nicks’ experience with substance abuse doesn’t end there. 

Nicks, fearing a relapse, would visit a psychiatrist in 1986. She was then prescribed the strong benzodiazepine drug Klonopin to help her sleep and relax, despite the known risks that come with prescribing benzos to those who have experienced past drug addiction.

In her own words, taken from an interview with the Guardian, Nicks would attest that [klonopin is] “a very subtle drug. You just don’t feel it much, or so you think. On the bottle, it says, ‘Take as needed.’ That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. So you think: ‘Well, I need it every two hours.’ It’s addiction in a bottle.”

Nicks would go on to report that Klonopin addiction turned her into a vegetable for eight years.

It would take detox support and a second round of residential rehab before Stevie Nicks again put a drug behind her.

Moving Forward

As Nicks explained on country singer Tim McGraw’s show Beyond the Influence Radio, “I managed to save myself [from addiction]. I got through some pretty scary moments, but I saved me, nobody else saved me. I survived me. I survived my cocaine. I survived by myself.”

She would add, “I checked myself into rehab. Nobody did that for me. I did it…”

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