Travis Barker has admitted he quit smoking because he was diagnosed with a sobering condition.
“I only quit because I was diagnosed with esophageal precancer,” the Blink-182 drummer told rapper Kid Cudi during Wednesday’s episode of the “Big Bro with Kid Cudi” podcast. Barker, 50, added: “I loved blunts and I smoked too much. »
The musician said he asked his doctor, who is also a friend, “Is it serious?” to which the doctor replied: “This is your wake-up call, Trav. Don’t mess around. You need to stop smoking.”
Barker said that if he hadn’t received the warning from a trusted doctor, he “never would have stopped.”
The rock star joked that he “could be like Willie Nelson and smoke until the day I die, you know?”
Barker has previously shared his views on a past opioid addiction that he developed because of his lifelong fear of flying.
“My friends knew how much I dreaded being on the plane, and one of them gave me a pill to help with my anxiety,” he said in his documentary “Louder Than Fear.”
The rocker said he went from taking one or two OxyContin-like painkillers before flying to “having to take them” or he “couldn’t even function.”
At the height of his addiction, Barker revealed that he “did so many drugs” that he “had a security guard watching him” full-time whose “only job was to make sure I was breathing.”
Shanna Moakler, who was married to the musician from 2004 to 2008, shared that Barker once told her, “I sometimes take about 20 to 30 pills a day.” » She remembers thinking, “How are you alive?
Ultimately, he said a near-fatal plane crash in 2008 that killed three friends served as his “re-education.” “People always ask me, ‘Have you been to rehab?’ “, he told Men’s Health in 2021.
“And I (said), ‘No, I was in a plane crash.’ It was my rehabilitation,” he continued. “Losing three of your friends and almost dying? That was my wake-up call. If I hadn’t had an accident, I probably never would have given up.”
He also admitted that before the accident he had smoked an “excessive amount of weed” and abused painkillers to the point of developing osteoporosis.
Barker claimed that during an 11-week hospitalization after the accident, he “regained consciousness” during surgeries because he had developed a high tolerance to opioids.
Barker said he flushed everything down the toilet when he left the hospital, “including the things I really needed.”
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