Steve Coogan: 'I was rushed to hospital after taking so much cocaine I thought I was dying'

'Recovering addict': Steve Coogan
Ian West/PA
Tom Marshall3 October 2015
The Weekender

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Steve Coogan has revealed he was once rushed to hospital after taking so much cocaine he thought he was going to die.

The comedian and actor opened up about the "terrifying" episode and his drug taking in an extract from his new autobiography Easily Distracted, published today in The Guardian.

He told how he started taking cocaine in the early 1990s and still considers himself an addict, despite having given up drink and drugs some time ago.

The Alan Partridge creator said he suffered from dreadful panic attacks brought on by the drug and described his terror the first time it happened, after being “up all night doing drugs” during the Edinburgh Festival.

He wrote: “I could feel pins and needles in my left arm, and my heart was thundering. I thought I was having a heart attack.

In character: Coogan as Alan Partridge

“Patrick put me in a car and drove through red lights to get me to hospital.

“I cried all the way. I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘I’m going to die. This is it. My headstone will say: Stephen Coogan, born in Middleton in 1965, died in Edinburgh in 1992, aged 26 years.’ What a waste!”

At the hospital, a doctor told him he was fine and that it was “just a panic attack”.

However, he said the panic attacks persisted and quickly made him “depressed”.

“They wouldn’t go away,” he said.

“I started to think I was going mad. I’d be having dinner in a restaurant, surrounded by people I did and didn’t know – or anywhere I felt I couldn’t easily escape – and I couldn’t breathe.

“I very quickly became depressed.”

Coogan, whose book is published on Thursday, writes that he started taking cocaine again when the panic attacks subsided and ended up spending time in a rehab clinic.

The comic said that while he no longer drinks or takes drugs, he “will always be a recovering addict”.

"Being a functioning addict is a curse; my life didn’t ever quite fall apart," he said. "I maintained a certain quality in my work that almost gave me a licence to misbehave.

"I put a number of people through rehab at my own expense while still abusing drugs myself. I spent tens of thousands of pounds on everyone else’s addiction, but it took me a long time to face up to my own."

Easily Distracted is published by Century.

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