Eminem Opens Up About Depression and Drug Addiction: 'I Was at My Lowest Point'

Eminem is arguably one of the best rappers in the industry. The 49-year-old, born Marshall Bruce Mathers III, has several #1 hits and 15 Grammys, but not everything has been easy for "When I'm Gone" artist.

Eminem is celebrating XXL's 25th anniversary and is doing so by taking a look back at his career, including talking about hard topics such as depression and drug addiction.

"I was at the lowest point," Eminem told XXL. "I didn't even know what I was going to do because it didn't look like it was going to happen. I'm 24 years old and I got a baby to take care of and all I want to do is rap, but it didn't look good. I was super depressed."

But everything changed for the "Lose Yourself" rapper when he unexpectedly found himself at Dr. Dre's house, landing the chance of a lifetime. "I remember I was in the car with some friends and shit right before I went to L.A., right after the Rap Olympics in 1997," Eminem told XXL.

The firm album had just been released and the song "Phone Tap" was "one of the greatest beats ever made", according to Eminem. "I remember saying, 'If I could just get with Dre, man, my God that'd be so crazy. He's so fuckin' ill'," he told XXL. And then, three weeks later, Eminem found himself at Dre's house. "We made The Slim Shady LP. That was a fun album to make, but it's also where everything suddenly changed," the rapper explained.

Shortly after Eminem made his album "The Slim Shady LP" with Dr. Dre, drugs became a huge part of the way the rapper coped.

"When I first came out to L.A., me and some guys I was hanging out with used to go to Tijuana and we would buy drugs," Eminem said. "Vicodin and that kinda shit. I don't know how many times we did it, but it was so easy to go back and forth to do it. The last time we went, we're second in line and this dude in front of us starts arguing with the guy in Customs, and they fuckin' throw him down on the ground and start pulling pills out his pockets and shit. We were scared shitless, but we got through. And when I say we had the motherlode. Our pants were frickin' stuffed with pills. I don't know how many we had."

The "Stan" rapper never thought he had a problem with drugs. "I just really, really liked drugs," he said. And the more money the artist made, the more drugs he could buy.

"My addiction didn't start in my early days when I was coming up. We used to drink 40s on the porch and just battle rap each other. My drug usage started at the beginning of that first album. I didn't take anything hard until I got famous. I was experimenting. I hadn't found a drug of choice. Back then you went on tour and people were just giving you free drugs. I managed it for a little while. And then, it just became, I like this shit too much and I don't know how to stop."

Eminem dove even deeper into the discussion, touching upon how much pressure he dealt with being a White rapper. In fact, XXL even wrote an article on the artist, and just how hurt he was by that.

"I don't even know if I read the whole article—I was used to reading things like that about me—but it hurt because I felt they didn't know me to make that kind of judgment," he expressed. "Coming up, I had to deal with that a lot. I wanted to be respectful because what I do is Black music. I knew I was coming into it as a guest in the house. And XXL, The Source, Rap Pages and Vibe were hip-hop bibles at the time."

And this pressure was all happening at the same time he was battling with drugs, and even though Eminem started to realize the addiction internally, others did not know. "I was able to downplay my addiction and hide it for a while until it got really bad," he explained, which happened when he was coming off The Marshall Mathers LP and going into Encore album.

"I was taking Vicodin, Valium and alcohol," Eminem told XXL. "I kinda fell off the map a little bit and didn't explain why I went away. I remember things started getting really, really bad when me, 50 and G-Unit did BET's 106 & Park. We performed "You Don't Know" on the show and then we did an interview afterward. That's when the wheels started coming off. One of the hosts was talking to me and I could not understand a word she was saying. 50 had to cover for me and answer every question."

The rapper then started to take Ambien on top of it, but things really took a turn for Eminem when his friend, Proof, passed away.

"I was in my house by myself, and I was just laying in bed and I couldn't move and I just kept staring at the ceiling fan. And I just kept taking more pills," the rapper explained. "I literally couldn't walk for two days when that happened and eventually my drug use fuckin' skyrocketed. I had fuckin' 10 drug dealers at one time that I'm getting my shit from. Seventy-five to 80 Valiums a night, which is a lot. I don't know how the fuck I'm still here. I was numbing myself."

But when looking back, Eminem realzed that all the heaviest drug usage and addiction spanned only about five years of his life.

"It felt like a long time when it was happening, but looking back at it now, it wasn't that long of a time for my problem to explode as it did," he said.