Jason Biggs has opened up about deeply personal stories from his previous struggle with addiction, including a particularly haunting episode involving a cocaine stash and a garbage bin.
During an appearance on the Well with Arielle Lorre podcast, the actor disclosed that during his addiction’s peak, he repeatedly retrieved a bag of cocaine from a trash can multiple times throughout a single evening.
Following the massive success of 1999’s American Pie, Biggs explained he “figured out pretty fast” that he had free rein to do whatever he pleased, characterizing that period as, “being 22 with cash in the bank and coke in my pocket and nobody telling me no.”
Biggs tied the knot with his wife Jenny Mollen in 2008, and he revealed he kept using drugs and drinking far beyond what she realized while trying to shut “everything out with drugs and alcohol… and it just kept getting worse and worse.”
Looking back on one of his darkest episodes, Biggs described how it was 4 a.m., Mollen was fast asleep, and he was using cocaine alone in their house. Recognizing he had to quit, he stepped outside and dumped the drugs in the garbage bin.
“Within a quarter hour, right as my final hit started fading, I’m thinking, what the hell am I doing? I dig through my garbage, pull it back out and snort a line,” he shared, starting his account around the 59:28 mark in the video above. He then tried once more to toss the cocaine in the outdoor trash bin, followed by taking an Ambien to help him fall asleep.
“Right before I took the Ambien, I thought, ‘Just one more,'” he explained. “I went outside, climbed right into that dumpster to grab the coke bag and headed back upstairs for another line. I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is wrong with me? This is completely crazy.'”
So he jumped in his vehicle, cruised down Sunset Boulevard, and chucked the remaining drugs into a garbage bin, even cracking open a coffee cup that still contained coffee. But when his final hit wore off, he got back in his car to recover the coke.
“I could have simply torn open that baggie and flushed it down the toilet, but I couldn’t,” he admitted. “That felt too permanent. I knew I’d finish that entire bag the second I had it back, but I kept playing these mind games with myself. That moment was dangerously close to hitting rock bottom.”
The 47-year-old has maintained his sobriety for more than seven years now and describes being sober as “liberating.” He continued: “There’s a liberation that comes with no longer being forced to do those things.”
