Eminem Opens Up About Surviving Near-Fatal Drug Overdose: ‘I Didn’t Know What Happened’

Rap icon Eminem reveals that a near-fatal drug overdose was the wake-up call that finally inspired him to get sober after years of drug addiction.

The Slim Shady rapper, 52, was in such bad condition after the OD that his manager, Paul Rosenberg, was afraid he had suffered brain damage. Not only was it unclear if he would ever record another album, but he also struggled to relearn how to walk, talk and even rap again.

“I got into this vicious cycle of, ‘I’m depressed so I need more pills,’” the 8 Mile star reveals in Stans, a new documentary. “Then your tolerance gets so high that you end up overdosing.

“I woke up in the hospital and I didn’t know what happened. I [had] tubes in me and s**t and I couldn’t get up, I wanted to move.”

By the time he ODed, he’d been abusing prescription pills — including Vicodin, Valium, Ambien and Xanax — taking up to 20 pills a day starting in the late 1990s until around 2008, per US Weekly.

But his near-death experience made him realize he was “gonna die” if he didn’t change his life. Adding to his motivation to get clean was the realization that he missed a guitar recital for his daughter Hailie, now 29.

“I cried because it was like, ‘Oh my god, I missed that,’” admits the Oscar, Emmy and Grammy winner, who has two other children, Alaina, 32, and Stevie, 23. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Do you want to f**king miss this again? Do you want to miss everything? If you can’t do it for yourself, you f**king py, at least do it for them.’”

That’s when he vowed to finally get sober — and he’s now been clean for 17 years. Besides the physical recovery, Eminem says he had to relearn how to rap again. “My writing had gotten terrible,” he confesses in the doc.

But working on his 2009 album, Relapse, “turned the light on,” he says. “I realized I’m not embarrassed anymore about [sobriety]. I started treating sobriety like a superpower and I took pride in the fact that I was able to quit.”