Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix talks “falling off the wagon” during pandemic

"I just got caught up and depressed and just stuck in this space"

Papa Roach‘s Jacoby Shaddix has discussed “falling off the wagon” during the coronavirus pandemic in a new interview.

The frontman, who stopped drinking alcohol in 2012, revealed that he recently had a slip-up on his path to sobriety due to him being “caught up and depressed and just stuck in this space”.

“Just to be straight with you, during the pandemic, I fell off the wagon and I was smoking pot,” Shaddix said on the Hardcore Humanism With Dr. Mike podcast. “And I just got caught up and depressed and just stuck in this space. And I wasn’t working an active program of recovery, and I found myself with a joint in my mouth, you know? And yeah, it’s legal in California, and yes, it is medicine to some people, but it’s not to me.

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“Anytime I put any kind of mind-altering substance in my body, there’s this veil that gets dropped on me and just kind of isolates me from the world, isolates me from the potential of who I can become and puts me in a space of inaction. And that’s not a good place for me to be.”

Papa Roach Reading
Papa Roach. CREDIT: Jenn Five.

He continued: “So I got honest with my brothers in recovery. I was, like, ‘Hey, man, this what I’ve been up to. I need help, dude. I need help getting myself back out of this.’ Because I knew I was getting closer. I told my guys, ‘Well, at least I didn’t drink.’ And they were, like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s good. That is good, Cobe. But you were headed straight towards it, homey. That’s where you were going.’ And that was a really hard realisation but a good realisation for me to have, is to really understand I was feeding the bad wolf. I was just doing the wrong things.”

Shaddix added that last month marked nine years since he last drank alcohol. “That’s not my sobriety date that I hold, but it’s nine years for me, and I’m fucking proud of that,” he said. “It’s given me an opportunity to just try to become fully human, because I was straight subhuman as an alcoholic, as a drinker, and it was real messy. So just to be straight with you, I’ve got a new sobriety date, and I’m okay with that.”

Meanwhile, Papa Roach are pleading with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel to release vinyl records trapped due to Brexit.

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As the band revealed on Twitter, copies of their new ‘Greatest Hits’ album have been trapped in UK customs for over a week, and risk not arriving with fans by its release date this week (March 19).

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