Lamar Odom is getting candid about his drug use during the period when he was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel, saying in a new essay that he was “doing coke every day” at the time.
“At that point in my life, I was doing coke every day. Pretty much every second of free time that I had, I was doing coke. I couldn’t control it,” Odom wrote in a column for The Players’ Tribune published Thursday. “I didn’t want to control it.”
That’s a slightly different account that the former NBA star — who was hospitalized after being found unconscious in his room at the Love Ranch South in Pahrump, Nevada, in 2015 after booking a five-day spree at the brothel — has offered in the past.
In June, Odom appeared on “The Wendy Williams Show” and denied that drugs had anything to do with the brothel incident.
“I think that was God just trying to talk to me, get me to stop doing whatever I was doing,” Odom, who has long struggled with addiction issues, told Williams. “Because I didn’t take any drugs that night.”
In an application for a search warrant to draw blood from Odom following the brothel incident, a detective with the Nye County Sheriff’s Office told a judge that he interviewed two prostitutes and the brothel’s manager after Odom collapsed. He was informed by brothel employees that Odom had taken “an unknown substance in the form of an unidentified pill” that he pulled from an unmarked plastic bag.
The detective also said that prostitutes at the legal brothel told him that Odom “possibly ingested cocaine in the bathroom adjoining to the bedroom” where he was staying. “They indicated that they heard him snorting,” the document reads. “They indicated that they had vague knowledge of him using illicit drugs.”
But in his June interview with Williams, Khloe Kardashian’s ex-husband remained adamant in his denial.
When Williams asserted that a toxicology report indicated that Odom had cocaine in his system, the former NBA player insisted, “OK, but I didn’t.”
In Thursday’s essay, Odom continued, “I think of all the sneaky sh— I tried to get away with. All the times I did wrong. All the stuff I tried to hide. If it’s not in the public light, it’s in God’s light.”
Recalling how he woke up in a hospital bed in Nevada after spending four days in a coma, Odom wrote, “I was laying there in that bed, hooked up to all these machines, people all around me crying, and there was no running from it anymore. It was like God was telling me, ‘Whatever the f-ck you think you’re doing, you need to slow down. Or it’s gonna be worse than this.’”