Jacoby Shaddix revealed in a new interview that he fell off the wagon during the pandemic.
In an appearance on the Hardcore Humanism with Dr. Mike podcast, the Papa Roach frontman said, “Just to be straight with you, I, during the pandemic, I fell off the wagon and I was smoking pot. I just got caught up and depressed, you know, 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?”
Shaddix added, “Yeah, it’s legal in California. And yes, it is medicine to some people, but it’s not to me. Anytime, I put any kind of mind-altering substance in my body, there’s like this veil that gets dropped on me and just kind of like isolates me from the world.”
In February 2020, Shaddix celebrated eight years of sobriety in a video to social media. The video showed Papa Roach at the Backdoor in Milan, Italy, which touts itself as being the smallest bar in the world, and the band ordered a round of mocktails in honor of Shaddix’s milestone.
While Shaddix said he didn’t partake in drinking during his sobriety break, he acknowledged that returning to alcohol would have been imminent had he not sought out a recovery program.
“I told my guys [in my recovery group], ‘Well, at least I didn’t drink,’ and they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s good. That is good, Cobe. But you were heading straight towards it, homey. Like, that’s where you are going.’ And that was a really hard realization, but a good realization for me to have, is to really understand like, I was feeding the bad wolf.”