Eddie Van Halen struggled with addiction his entire life.
After doctors gave him steroid pills to combat swelling after surgery to remove a brain tumor near the end of his life, the legendary guitarist began to abuse them, his brother Alex told Rolling Stone in an interview published on Tuesday.
One day, Alex said, he realized Eddie had taken an entire bottle of pills because they made him “feel like Superman.”
“I didn’t see the bottle, but the bottle had, like, a thousand pills in it,” he added. “If two’s good, 20’s better. That was our mantra.”
Eddie Van Halen died in October 2020 after a massive stroke after a battle with throat cancer.
“You know, he fought until the end,” Alex told Rolling Stone. “Anybody who thought he was anything less than that can suck my you-know-what. … If you knew what he had to go through to beat the cancer — he wouldn’t do traditional treatment. Some of the off-the-wall s— caused such a toxic mix in his body. And, yeah, you shouldn’t drink with it, Ed!”
Alex said Eddie went to Switzerland for experimental cancer treatments before his death and continued to make music while there.
