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Aug. 22, 2025 – “I tried getting sober at 23. I didn’t get sober until I was 36,” he told High Times. “My life has been destroying it, rebuilding it, having an amazing life for like a year or two, then self-sabotaging it back to just nothing. I was tired, man. I was just tired.” Zink’s story is steeped in tragedy. He lost his wife to suicide in 2015. Two years later, his father also took his life. In the wake of these losses and his own near-suicide attempt, Zink spiraled into addiction, secrecy, and shame.
“You tell people you’re a coke addict, they look at you sideways,” he said. “So I just told everybody I was an alcoholic… I didn’t know any better. That’s kind of where I started.”
Growing up in what he describes as a privileged household with a doctor father, Eric didn’t face overt abuse or neglect, but trauma, he stresses, can take many forms. “It filters in different ways,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be forgotten by my parents… wandering around Kmart as a kid, looking for my mom and dad who forgot me. And then they come back yelling at me because it was my fault.”
For years, drugs and alcohol filled a void. “It would just kind of make the world go silent for a bit. And I just fought for that because I didn’t know how else to do it,” he said. “That was the scariest thing alcohol made me feel normal.”
