Mark Ronson hasn’t touched a hard drug in years, but in his new memoir, the music producer regretfully admits to having one too many close calls when he was younger.
“One night, when I was out late and already flying on E [ecstasy], I took a bump of coke,” Ronson, 50, recalls in Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City (out Tuesday, September 16). “Within minutes, my chest tightened and my left arm went numb. Could I be having a stroke? At twenty?”
Ronson remembers “trembling, waiting for the panic to pass, but it wouldn’t let up.” Eventually, his friends found him “curled up in a corner practically catatonic” and took him home.
“They tried to joke with me as we drove up Park Avenue, hoping to pull me out of my hole,” he writes. “I gave a faint, unconvincing smile. When we got home, [my friend] Tom gently tucked me into bed, reminding me of the English nurses who cared for me when I was hospitalized for meningitis as a boy.”
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Ronson clarifies that “these episodes didn’t happen every time [he] got high, but it was becoming a roll of the dice.”
In addition to ecstasy and cocaine, Ronson confesses to dabbling with heroin on multiple occasions, starting at the age of 18.
“I was overdoing it, mixing drugs like cocktails,” he reflects in the book. “One night, I took heroin by accident — sort of (pass me a bag of powder and I never asked too many questions).”
Ronson writes that he was “lucky” to have never gotten “completely swallowed up” by addiction like some of his close friends.
“The three kids who’d joined me in Alphabet City during my brief heroin phase, years back, were still struggling now,” he shares. “Once lively, they now moved at half speed, their faces gray and pallid. And I hated how junk drained the color from the people I loved.”
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Ronson’s memoir only covers his life in the 1990s, but his drug use continued well into the 2010s.
In a London Times profile published on Friday, September 12, Ronson confessed to “doing drugs in the toilet” immediately after the 2016 Grammy Awards, where he won Record of the Year for his smash Bruno Mars collaboration, “Uptown Funk.” Ronson explained in a subsequent interview with The Sun, “It was really in my late 30s, early 40s and around [my 2007 album] Version and into [2010’s] Record Collection that I was really going the hardest.”
However, these days look much different for Ronson: He married actress Grace Gummer in 2021, and they have since welcomed two daughters.
“I’m not [completely] sober, but I also don’t fling myself at stimulation and chaos any chance I can get,” he writes at the end of Night People. “Looking back at the early days, I can’t believe what I put my body through, how normal I thought it was and the ways in which it kept me disassociated from the real stuff of life.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
