Aaron Neville details harrowing struggle with heroin: ‘Before you know it, you’re in the game’

Aaron Neville opens up about his decades-long battle with heroin addiction in his new memoir Tell It Like It Is: My Story, saying that it began when he was 16-years-old.

The R&B and soul singer, 82, said in the forthcoming book – excerpts from it were published in People Wednesday – that he ‘heard people talking about it way back in the Calliope’ neighborhood of New Orleans where he grew up.

‘I knew plenty of other people who were doing it,’ The Tell It Like It Is artist They seemed to be having a good time with it. I wanted to do it too.’

Neville said he was able to pay for the heroin with money he made as a musician.

‘I was playing gigs and making money, so I had some cash to score,’ the Don’t Know Much singer said in the book.

He described himself as ‘an inquisitive kid’ who was ‘always looking for the next sensation, the next experience, the next adventure.

‘For me, heroin was just one more thing like that,’ Neville said.

Neville said that he was relaxing on a pal’s stoop the first time he tried the drug, and he was quickly hooked.

‘The first time you do heroin your brain is hooked in and wants it, even if your body isn’t craving it yet,’ he said. ‘It’s a kind of curiosity, and then it turns into a yearning that you shake off on the weekends, and then before you know it, you’re in the game, running and looking for it everywhere.’

The singer-songwriter in the book recalled an instance in which he was praying for his life while sharing drugs with others in New York City, saying, ‘Dear Lord, please get me out of here.’

Neville said that he ‘was really tired of running’ when he entered a drug rehabilitation clinic in the 1980s after as his musical group with his brothers, The Neville Brothers, had inked a new recording contact.

The singer said that at one point, he created art that helped him internalize his struggle: ‘I drew a picture of myself on a cross with syringes as the nails.’

Neville said in his new book that he knew heroin ‘was killing [him] slowly’ and he ‘was ready to kick for good.’

The Grammy-winning artist was pictured in July of 1992 in his native Louisiana 

Neville said that he was relaxing on a pal’s stoop the first time he tried the drug, and was quickly hooked. Pictured in NYC in 2018 

Neville opens up about his past struggles in Tell It Like It Is: My Story, his new memoir slated to be released September 5

He continued: ‘I was excited and afraid. I knew what mainlining did to me. I knew what withdrawal feels like.’

Neville said that despite the horrors of the drugs he had experienced, he was still frightened about coming off the drug.

‘Begging off the drugs entirely – that was a new venture,’ he said. ‘I was 40 years old, and I hadn’t been clean since junior high school.’

He said that after rehab, he had never used heroin again, though he did have issues with prescription medication in later years. 

Tell It Like It Is: My Story is slated to be released September 5.