Posted on 01/24/2003 8:38:49 PM PST by mhking
Yasmine Bleeth: My battle with drugs
Thursday January 23, 2003
FOR Baywatch beauty Yasmine Bleeth, getting high on drugs brought her so low, it nearly killed her.
Now she's poured out her heart and revealed for the first time her horrific battle with cocaine, her rocky fight to win back her life and the love that is helping her.
Two years ago, the actress' drug habit was so bad, she didn't sleep for days at a time. She looked like death and on Sept. 12, 2001, she nearly drove herself into an early grave after losing control of her car on a Michigan road and careening into a median while high.
She spent a night in jail and, after a plea bargain, was sentenced to two years' probation and 100 hours of community service.
"For three years, people had been telling me that drugs would kill me," says Yasmine, 34, who was in the car with boyfriend Paul Cerrito, whom she married last August. "And this was my proof."
Bleeth says cocaine crept into her world so slowly, so easily, she didn't realize it until she was hooked.
When her three-year contract with Baywatch ended in 1997, she moved from L.A. to San Francisco and started her gig on Nash Bridges, opposite Don Johnson. Her romance with actor Richard Grieco had all but died, and she started drowning her pain with drugs.
"I just wanted to feel good again," she confides. "And I knew an easy way to get that feeling."
At first Yasmine just snorted the stuff socially on weekends with people she knew. Three months later, she made her first call to a dealer.
"It was like ordering Chinese food," she says. "I made one phone call and they delivered it to my front door."
Suddenly, she was in love again - with the white powder. "It was all I could think about," she admits. "When I was high, I didn't think about my problems. I had no pain. I wouldn't sleep for two or three days, sometimes even four or five."
By the end of 1999, her ghastly appearance started scaring her friends and family.
"I'm a fleshy girl, very curvy and round, but I lost my softness," she says. "I looked like an alien. My eyes were bulging out of my face. I was 110 pounds and a size 0. I looked dead."
In fact, she was slowly killing herself.
"I had an infection that had completely eaten out the inside of my nose," she tells Glamour magazine. "Essentially, I had gangrene in my nose."
The doctor put her on antibiotics and told her that another couple of months with this infection and it could have gone to her brain and killed her.
"That scared me," says Yasmine. "Until I started doing drugs again six weeks later."
In no time, the devastating drug cycle began again. Remarkably, she managed to drag herself to the set of the series Titans. But she was in no shape to film. The show's producer, Aaron Spelling, gave her time off to go to rehab at Promises in Malibu, Calif.
"I did drugs right up until I entered the program," says Yasmine. "I even did drugs in the Town Car on the way there."
During her December 2000 treatment, she met someone who made her feel better than the powder: Michigan bar owner Paul Cerrito, 32. After rehab, Yasmine invited Paul to stay with her in L.A.
"I thought that if ever I could handle doing drugs casually, now would be the time," she says. "But once I started doing coke, I lost control, and it took over my life again."
Yasmine was high when she crashed her car in Michigan a year and a half ago and nearly died. But now she sees that crash as a godsend. "I felt like some force had saved our lives," she says.
She knew she desperately needed to quit drugs - and finally, she did. Then this past August, just less than a year after her car crash, she and Paul tied the knot in Santa Barbara and honeymooned in Hawaii.
Yasmine is clean now, but it hasn't been easy. Her husband's love helps her over the rough patches.
"The feeling I have when I'm with Paul is better than how I felt on cocaine," she says.
But she still has to take one day at a time.
"Consciously trying to stay off drugs is now part of my life, and it always will be," she says.
"I've proven to myself that I can't have both drugs and love. Every day, I have to make the choice again. So far, I choose love."
Alcohol IS a hard drug: it's addictive and deadly.
Bravo! True and well-riposted.
That wasn't the point or the question.
Alcoholism is every bit as debilitating as other addictions. Tobacco contributes significantly to various cancers and other health-related problems. Why aren't you calling for the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco?
IMO, there is no safe level of coke or herione use, although that is merely my opinion. There are probably those that believe that those can be used in some form of moderation. Some people may be correct about that. I just think it is dangerous to even play with it. My preacher thinks alcoholism is too dnagerous to even have a single drink. I disagree.
However that does not mean that the government has the 'right' (although it has the power) to legislate healthy living.
What's worse, is that the Constitution gets trampled in the name of the WOD which is the government's way (supposedly) of requiring citizens to live healthy lifestyle.
To support the current WoD, you have to support the use of militarily trained government agents running paramilitary operations in foreign countries. Do you support that?
That's a lie.
Hey LeRoy! Are you ever going to post about ANYTHING but drugs?
I have. Your implication to the contrary is another lie.
Bravo Sierra. Mr. LeRoy doesn't need my help to defend himself, but what you posted here is so far off something needed to be said. Check yourself, pal.
Yet another lie. Typical Drug Warrior.
I'll believe you when I see you smoke crack instead of drink a can of beer. Go lie to someone else. Only idiots and fool believe your jive.
I don't do either; your implication to the contrary is yet another of your many lies. (By the way, for honest readers: crack vs. beer is a bogus comparison---crack vs. Everclear would be the right one.)
My program is to execute (kill) hard drug pushers and dealers. While your program is to kill the stupid users via drug legalization. That's the diff between you and me. Face it. You all have no moral center. Would you support drug legalization if this results in 10 times as many meth addicts and laboratories?
Is it not amusing there are so many more gambling addicts now that gambling is essentially legal. With even the government pushing gambling and lotteries. Same would happen with drug legalization.
I don't do either; your implication to the........
That's why you are so warped. This is just mental gymnastics to you. This is all a parlor game to you.
Go shoot up. Go smoke some crack. Go have a case of beer. Then get back to me. I have never used heroin, crack or meth but you sure need to for a reality check. As of now you're just slinging bllsht not based on experience. Getting off on thinking yourself a winner of your social Darwinism head games. Good bye! Gotta go.
If what I say about them is BS because I've never used them, then what can we conclude from the fact that you've also never used them?
Luckily for us, there are other (and in this case better) ways of getting knowledge than by direct experience. For example, one can read Institute of Medicine research to learn that the percentage of all users who ever became dependent is virtually identical for alcohol (15%) and cocaine (17%).
Getting off on thinking yourself a winner of your social Darwinism head games.
Yet another of your many lies.
I did no such thing. If I believed that alcohol and heroine were equals, I would not drink.
I could hear such nonsense in college bull sessions every night of the week. But what does the swash buckling dude (you) practice in his real life? Drinking but no hard dope. Go shoot up tomorrow if you want to practice what you preach. Where's yoru guts and rugged individualism? How come you aren't out smoking crack and shooting up meth? Are you too pussy or too busy subconciously wishing doom on others not as smart as you? No guts no glory
Wow. What a diatribe. Done yet?
There are plenty of things that I don't do that I believe that the government has no business prohibiting (notice I did NOT say 'regulating'): gambling, prostitution, sucking the heads of crawfish, smoking cigarettes, smoking pot, overeating, skateboarding, body piercing, magazines featuring naked people, snowboarding, surfing, to list a few.
Does that make me a swashbuckler because I don't do everything that I think people have a right to do? Would that make mne a swashbukler (and pussy) if I strongly advocated a right to keep and bear arms as well as concealed carry rights but did not myself owned a gun?
Would you still consider me a swashbuckler if I never published and article yet stood up for a free press?
Or how about if I stand up for the rights of parents to homeschool their kids but I don't do the same?
You seem to be saying that if you advocate a right to do something, you MUST also participate or perform that act or else you are a hypocrite.
BTW, you never asnwered my question:
Should alcohol and tobacco be prohibited? Do people have a right to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes?
And you need to stop making love to road kill.
Horsesh!t.
Who would have the insurable interest? Who would be the owner of the policy? What would happen if/when the premiiums were too high to bear but the person refused to stop smoking pot? Is this a disability policy? Is this a liability policy?
Bottom line is that KC still wants GOVERNMENT to force people to do things he approves of and stop ding thisng he disapproves of.
But he never really justifies why pot is illegal and booze and cigs are legal.
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