The ‘Basic Instinct’ star suffered a near-fatal stroke in 2001
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NEED TO KNOW
- Sharon Stone revealed why she decided to live a drug-free life despite doctors telling her she can “never go off of” her stroke medication
- “I just thought, ‘I want my life back,’ ” she said
- In 2001, Stone was given a 1% chance of survival after a ruptured vertebral artery bled into her brain for nine days
Sharon Stone has decided to live a drug-free life.
Nearly 25 years after she experienced a near-fatal stroke that resulted in her taking a two-year break from acting, the Basic Instinct actress, 68, revealed that she has since decided to stop taking her medications — despite doctors telling her she “couldn’t go off of it.”
“They said, ‘You can’t go off of it. You can never go off of it.’ I’m like, ‘I’m going off it,’ and it was like going off of f—ing heroin,” Stone told Variety in a recent interview. “I was sick as a frigging dog for four and a half months. I just thought, ‘I want my life back.’ ”
Credit: Laurent Hou/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty
Determined to live a “drug-free life,” Stone went on to explain that she has spent the past few years getting off “the majority of the drugs” she used to take.
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“Once I got off that, I decided I’m going to quit smoking pot,” she explained. “And because I think they put so much stuff in it now — they really do — when I stopped smoking pot, I also got sick.”
“It’s not like you’re pulling it out of the ground anymore. It’s not like when we were kids,” she added. “I got pretty sick for a month. I went to my neurologist, and he said, ‘Sharon, I’ve had people dying in the emergency room from marijuana.’ ”
In June 2023, Stone opened up about her experience with losing loved ones to drug abuse while hosting the ART HOUSE Gala, stating onstage that she shared that “a lot of my friends are dead.”
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“Do not cross the line between health and healing and abuse,” she continued while addressing the alleged drug pushing she had experienced with one of her sons as he recovered from a ski accident in the hospital. “My brother went to Attica [Prison] — he crossed the line. Do not cross the line with me.”
Stone first became a mom in 2000 when she and her then-husband, Phil Bronstein, adopted their first child, son Roan, 26. In 2005, she adopted her second son, Laird, 21, and a year later, her third son, Quinn, 20.
While sharing further insight into her health scare, during which the actress was given a 1% chance of survival after a ruptured vertebral artery bled into her brain for nine days, Stone told PEOPLE that she had “become more comfortable with publicly saying what’s really happened to me.”
“For a long time I wanted to pretend that I was just fine,” she explained that October. “I need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for my brain medication to work so that I don’t have seizures. So I’m a disability hire, and because of that I don’t get hired a lot. These are the things that I’ve been dealing with for the past 22 years, and I am open about that now.”
“I lost everything. I lost all my money. I lost custody of my child. I lost my career. I lost all those things that you feel are your real identity and your life,” she continued. “I never really got most of it back, but I’ve reached a point where I’m okay with it, where I really do recognize that I’m enough.”
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