Bryan Greenberg Reveals He Became Briefly 'Hooked' on Oxycontin: 'I Was Getting Dope Sick'
Bryan Greenberg made a shocking confession about his brush with opioid addiction.
The One Tree Hill alum, 45, opened up about a scary moment in his life when he was prescribed Oxycontin by a doctor and developed a brief dependency on it.
"My inspiration came because a few years ago, I'm not an addict, but I went in for a routine surgery and I was prescribed Oxycontin, and I got really hooked on them," he revealed. "And I was getting dope sick getting off of them."
"It was just like one pill turned into four pills a day, turned into 10 pills a day, turned into 15 pills a day," he noted. "I was like, 'Oh, I've got to probably stop doing this, this is getting to me. It was like, 'Oh, I feel sick without them. I need them. I'm actually physically ill without them.'"
"My doctors kind of just cut me off," the October Road star added of how his near-spiral came to a halt. "They were like. 'You're done.' And I could have gone the illegal route. You can start finding pills in other places. And if you can't find pills at the time, you could go to the streets. Now, you don't have to look very far at all."
Greenberg also attributed kicking the opioids to being a "control freak" over everything in his life. "I don't like things having power over me. It was like, 'You're making me an addict so I'm going to figure out what that's all about, and I'm going to try to beat that,'" he said.
"I feel like honestly, I lost a few months, and for that to happen to someone like me who's not an addict, it really pissed me off. I wanted to investigate how a system could be put in place to make addicts out of people," he admitted of the current state of the health care system in America.
Greenberg used his experience to channel his new role in the movie Junction, which focuses on the opioid crisis in the United States.
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"There is a vast array of people that we see in 90 minutes of this film, but it all folds into one cohesive story in the end," the father-of-two explained of the movie. "I took a lot on with this film, more than I ever have with any other project. I decided to make my own story."
People conducted the interview with Greenberg.