It Takes a Village –
December 18, 2019 – There was a lady who saw that I was in pain and I think she very instantly asked me, ‘Hey, how are you gonna sing tonight?’” he tells PEOPLE of the first time he was introduced to prescription pain killers. “I said, ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll get through it.’ She said, ‘Well, I think I’ve got some medicine that will help you.’” The Ohio native says he began taking low dosages over the next few days. “I might’ve had maybe five painkillers that weekend and then I stopped,” he recalls.
But soon he found himself struggling with the start of a life-changing battle with addiction. I remember somebody else on the bus was having surgery a couple months later and me trying to find ways to come up with an ailment to try to get some of their medicine,” he says. “At that point, I should’ve known, ‘I think this is going to be a problem for you.’ I really didn’t consider addiction at the beginning because it was for a legitimate reason.”
“Our family was very, ‘You don’t go to the doctor,’ that kind of old school family,” he explained of his limited knowledge of prescription medicine. “When the lady gave me the medicine and I took it for the first time, I remember feeling this feeling of — euphoria is not even the word —
