Cocaine "Almost Killed" Kirstie Alley

Kirstie Alley says the Church of Scientology saved her from an addiction to cocaine that almost killed her years ago. The former Cheers star reveals that her sometimes multi-day drug binges started a few years prior to her career as a Hollywood actress, when her marriage to Bob Alley began to crumble. "I thought I was going to overdose almost every time," she tells Entertainment Tonight. "I kept going for that feeling of being extroverted and that would last for sixty seconds. And then I was going to die for thirty minutes, and then the second I wasn't going to die I went 'boom,' I'd do it again." The 61-year-old is now sober and says her clean living was inspired by Scientology—particularly L. Ron Hubbard's book Dianetics. “I sat there with cocaine on this mirror and I was reading Dianetics and doing cocaine at the same time,” she recalls. "Somehow I got through it and I thought this is either the world's biggest scam or, I thought, this is how I'm going to get rid of this hideous compulsion.” Although the method seems to have worked for Alley, Scientology's rehab program, Narconon, has been under investigation in the past for its detox process—which some have claimed is even life-threatening. “When I was at Narconon, people were taken away in ambulances and had to spend days in the hospital,” said David Love, a client at Narconon Trois-Rivieres from December 2008 to May 2009, who was interviewed exclusively by The Fix. “People have died in the Quebec facility.”