Make Page Six a Preferred Source Travis Barker confessed he quit smoking because he was diagnosed with a sobering condition.
“I only quit because I got diagnosed with precancer of the esophagus,” the Blink-182 drummer told rapper Kid Cudi during Wednesday’s episode of the “Big Bro with Kid Cudi” podcast. Barker, 50, added, “I loved blunts and I would smoke too much.”
The musician said he asked his doctor, who is also a friend, “Is this serious?” to which the physician replied, “This is your warning shot, Trav. Don’t f–k around. You gotta stop smoking.”
Barker said had he not received the warning from a trusted doctor, he “would have never stopped.”
The rock star joked he thought he “could be like Willie Nelson and smoke to the day I die, you know?”
Barker has previously shared insight into a past opioid addiction he developed over his lifelong fear of flying.
“My friends knew how much I dreaded being on planes, and one of them gave me a pill to help with my anxiety,” he said in his “Louder Than Fear” documentary.
The rocker said he went from taking just one or two OxyContin-type painkillers prior to flying to “having to be on them” or else he “couldn’t even function.”
At the height of his addiction, Barker divulged he was “doing so [many] drugs” that he “had a security guard watching him” full time whose “only job was to make sure I was breathing.”
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Shanna Moakler, who was married to the musician from 2004 to 2008, shared that Barker once told her, “I take about 20 to 30 pills a day sometimes.” She recalled thinking, “How are you alive?”
Ultimately, he said a near-fatal plane crash in 2008 that killed three friends acted as “rehab” for him. “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,” he went on. “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 also confessed that before the crash, he smoked an “excessive amount of weed” and abused painkillers to the point that he developed osteoporosis.
Barker claimed that during an 11-week hospitalization following the crash, he “came to” during surgeries because he’d developed a high tolerance for opioids.
Barker said he flushed everything down the toilet upon his release from the hospital, “including stuff that I really needed.”
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