Pregnant & Shooting Heroin: Mackenzie Phillips Admits Shocking Past
Feb. 10 2017, Updated 4:38 p.m. ET
Seven years after she confessed her secret sexual relationship with her late father, Mackenzie Phillips is coming clean about other horrifying behavior in her past life as an active heroin and cocaine addict.
The actress turned addiction counselor, 57, claims she abused drugs while expecting her son Shane in her new memoir and self-help book, Hopeful Healing.
“I shot up cocaine while pregnant with my son,” she bluntly admits. “The horror of my actions in sober retrospect is something that I deal with to this day.”
After a first failed attempt at rehab, Phillips continued using throughout her son’s early childhood — even when he was awake at home.
“My life revolved around drugs. I had my son, Shane, but my center was drugs. He would be calling for me, knocking on the bathroom door, and I would be on the other side shooting up,” she writes in the no-holds-barred read, adding that her troubled father, the Mamas and the Papas singer John Phillips, had done the same thing to her as a girl.
“I remembered being 16 or 17 and knocking on the bathroom door, looking for my dad, and hearing him say, ‘Not now, darling, Daddy’s shooting up.’ I remembered it being so normal that it didn’t even faze me.”
The American Graffiti star reached rock bottom when she realized the damage she had done to her little boy, who was just 4 years old at the time.
She “woke the f**k up” and vowed once and for all to “break the cycle of addiction and neglect.”
“I put down the needle, opened the bathroom door, and took responsibility for caring for my son and myself,” she says.
But after ten years of sobriety, Phillips relapsed again, first on pills but then graduating to “speedballs,” or injects of heroin and cocaine.
She was infamously arrested at a New York airport while attempting to go through security with heroin.
“I’m somebody’s mom. I’m somebody’s mom,” she recalls pleading with cops. “Shane doesn’t know. Shane doesn’t know.”
Of course, the begging didn’t save her from jail. The star’s sister bailed her out, and she agreed to go back to rehab.
But she soon betrayed her son’s trust again. When she stopped home to pack for treatment, Shane caught her sneaking syringes into her bag.
“I looked up and saw Shane, watching me,” she remembers years later. “I put them down and went to rehab.”
Now sober for many years, Phillips has a great relationship with Shane, 29, who lives with her in Los Angeles.
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Upon arriving home from work every day, “the first thing I’ll do is say hi to Shane…We visit, we talk about our day,” she writes. “There are back rubs and hugs and kisses on cheeks.”
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