Bleeth breaks her silence on battle against cocaine
“I never expected to get into drugs,” Yasmine Bleeth says.
But the former Baywatch actress has spent the past five years battling cocaine. She chronicles her addiction in the February issue of Glamour, which arrives on newsstands Tuesday.
At first, in 1998, cocaine was a social thing, says Bleeth, 34. Then she realized she could call a dealer and have it delivered to her home, “like ordering Chinese food.”
It soon became all she could think about: coming home from work to do lines. Baywatch ended in 1997; she was living in San Francisco playing opposite Don Johnson on Nash Bridges.
“I’d spend hours plucking my eyebrows, putting on tanning cream, doing a facial. But mostly, I’d shop on the Internet,” she says. “Shopping was instant gratification. Just like the drugs.”
Bleeth stopped seeing friends. She often had bloody noses. “And if I was sniffling, my publicist would tell people I had sinus problems, which I do.”
By the end of 1999, she “looked like an alien,” she says. Normally a size 6, she was down to size 0.
In July 2000, she collapsed at a Glamour photo shoot. Five months later she checked into Promises rehab center in Malibu. There she met Paul Cerrito, a club owner in Michigan. Life was looking up.
Two weeks later, she was taking cocaine again.
Then, in September 2001, she drove off a highway in Detroit while high on cocaine and hit a median. As part of a plea agreement, she must serve two years of probation and submit to regular drug tests.
Bleeth spent the next few months after the accident at Paul’s mother’s house in Michigan, staying sober and eating. She gained 20 pounds. In August 2002, she and Paul were married in Santa Barbara. It’s been a struggle, Bleeth writes, but she realizes that “consciously trying to stay off drugs is now part of my life and always will be.”
Categories