Dennis Quaid: Hollywood Blows!

Actor Dennis Quaid spoke out publically for the first time yesterday about the years-long cocaine addiction that almost ended his career as one of Hollywood’s most successful actors. “My greatest mistake was being addicted to cocaine,” Quaid said. But when Quaid first arrived in Hollywood in the 1970s, the drug was everywhere—on movie sets it was used by everyone from key grips up to studio execs. In an upcoming Newsweek piece, the actor said cocaine was perceived as such a necessity that its costs were secrety included “even in the budgets of movies, thinly disguised,” and that the drug was used as “petty cash” among the Hollywood elite. “Doing blow just contributed to me not being able to handle all that fame,” he said. “I’d wake up, snort a line, and swear I wasn’t going to do it again that day… meanwhile, my life was falling apart.” Quaid says he finally was able to recover from his cocaine addiction in the late 1990s. "But that time in my life—those years in the ’90s recovering—actually chiseled me into a person. It gave me the resolve and a resilience to persevere in life." Quaid was most recently seen playing Bill Clinton in an HBO movie.