Dennis Quaid Tells Megyn Kelly That He Did Cocaine “Pretty Much On A Daily Basis”

Dennis Quaid is finally ready to come clean about his cocaine addiction. This morning, Megyn Kelly Today aired a taped interview with Quaid, who discussed his drug addiction, his marriage to Meg Ryan, and his upcoming film Reagan. Quaid may be a successful, healthy actor now, but he revealed to Megyn Kelly that in the 1980s — the height of his early career — he was entirely dependent on cocaine, and it took a “white light experience” to set him on the path to recovery.

“I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, and there was a completely different attitude about it back then. It was even in some movie budgets,” Quaid told a shocked Kelly. “I was basically doing cocaine pretty much on a daily basis during the ’80s. I spent many, many a night screaming at God, ‘Please take this away from me. I’ll never do it again because I’ve only got an hour before I have to be at work.'” Despite Quaid’s best intentions, his addition prevented him from keeping this promise. “At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I’d go, ‘That’s not so bad,'” Quaid told Kelly about his dependence on the drug.

The actor’s downward spiral ended in the late 1980s, when he realized that his addiction was going to destroy his life. “I had what I call a white light experience where I saw myself either dead or losing everything that meant anything to me,” he said. Quaid was engaged to Meg Ryan at the time, and she stood by him as he entered rehab in 1990. They were married the following year, but their relationship didn’t last: the couple divorced in 2001. Despite their very public divorce, Quaid told Kelly that his relationship with Ryan was the “most successful relationship” of his life.

When Quaid left rehab, he changed his life entirely. “I meditated for 10 years straight. I read the Bible, I read the Dhammapada, I read the Bhagavad Gita, I read the Quran,” he told Kelly. “I just started really delving into the mystery, because that’s what addiction is really about. It’s about trying to fill up a hole inside yourself.” Who knew Dennis Quaid was so eloquent?

Watch Quaid’s entire interview on YouTube.