Former EastEnders star Paul Nicholls has admitted that he fears he may die if he is unable to kick his drug addiction issues for good.
The 42-year-old, who starred as Joe Wicks on the BBC soap in the late '90s, told The Sun that his problems started after a horrific incident in 2017 that saw him trapped under a waterfall in Thailand for three days.
The ordeal left him with 37 different infections and led to him suffering a stoke in 2018, after which he sank into a drug-fuelled depression.
"I've had addiction issues before and relapsed last year," he told the newspaper. "The rabbit hole I went down led to places that I never thought I'd end up in - in flats with people that I didn't know.
"I was taking lots of dihydrocodeine, a very strong opiate pain killer and on top of that, cocaine... every time I relapsed cocaine is always present.
"I sank like a stone into a deep depression. At certain points I'd be gone for three or four days and not sleep at all. I stopped caring, I pressed the 'fuck it' button.
"The last time I ended up in a flat with people smoking stuff, doing this and doing that. They recognised me. I was looking around and I thought, 'If I don't stop, I will die'."
Nicholls has now been clean for a few months and is a regular at Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
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