Travis Barker says it took a frightening diagnosis to get him to give up smoking for good. The Blink-182 drummer, 50, told rapper Kid Cudi on Wednesday’s episode of the “Big Bro with Kid Cudi” podcast that he was diagnosed with precancer of the esophagus before he stopped.
“I only quit because I got diagnosed with precancer of the esophagus,” Barker said. “I loved blunts and I would smoke too much.”
Barker said he pressed his doctor, who is also a friend, on how serious the diagnosis was. The doctor’s response stuck with him.
“This is your warning shot, Trav. Don’t f–k around. You gotta stop smoking.”
Barker said that without hearing it from someone he trusted, he “would have never stopped.” He joked that he once figured he “could be like Willie Nelson and smoke to the day I die.”
A past battle with opioids
This isn’t the first time Barker has opened up about addiction. In his documentary “Louder Than Fear,” he described developing an opioid dependency tied to a lifelong fear of flying, after a friend gave him a pill to ease his anxiety before a flight.
He said he went from taking one or two OxyContin-type painkillers before flights to needing them just to function. At the peak of his addiction, he said he was taking so many drugs that he had a security guard whose “only job was to make sure I was breathing.”
Shanna Moakler, who was married to Barker from 2004 to 2008, has recalled him telling her, “I take about 20 to 30 pills a day sometimes,” and said she wondered, “How are you alive?”
Barker has said a 2008 plane crash that killed three friends was the real turning point. “People are always like, ‘Did you go to rehab?'” he told Men’s Health in 2021. “And I [say], ‘No, I was in a plane crash.’ That was my rehab. Lose three of your friends and almost die? That was my wake-up call. If I wasn’t in a crash, I would have probably never quit.”
He has also said that before the crash, heavy marijuana and painkiller use left him with osteoporosis, and that during an 11-week hospital stay afterward, he woke up during surgeries because of his high tolerance to opioids. After he was released, he said he flushed away everything he had, “including stuff that I really needed.”
