Stevie Nicks’ Addiction and Recovery Examined in Excerpt From New Book

Lessons & Lace, an upcoming biography about Stevie Nicks, examines life lessons the Fleetwood Mac singer endured throughout her lengthy career and the wisdom she doled out in the aftermath.

Each chapter in the book, due out September 15 via Harmony/Penguin Random House, deals with a different life lesson, and in this exclusive excerpt to Rolling Stone, author Rachel Brodsky revisits Nicks’ long battles with drug addiction, both illicit (cocaine) and prescribed (Klonopin).

Through interviews and documentation, “Lesson Thirteen: Only You Can Save Yourself” focuses on Nicks’ cocaine addiction that stretched from the Rumours victory lap to her own solo career in the mid-Eighties. Her bandmates and friends (including Tom Petty) encouraged the singer to go to rehab with her condition spiraling, which Nicks eventually did.

However, after conquering her battle with cocaine, it was a therapist — who Nicks later called “Doctor Fuckhead” — who got the singer hooked for eight numbing years on Klonopin, which left her artistically barren in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Breaking that benzo addiction, Nicks said, was even more difficult than shaking off cocaine.

“The truth about drugs is how they are usually a symptom of an even bigger problem—in my case, an ego out of control,” Nicks, now hard drug-free (but an occasional pot smoker), said.

“Stevie Nicks’ addiction and recovery story is about a lot more than one person losing control and regaining it. It’s a warning about the physically demanding nature of being a popular touring musician in the 1970s/80s (or any era, really, including this one),” Brodsky tells Rolling Stone. “It’s a backwards look at how the medical community used to prescribe a wild amount of benzodiazepines to help their patients cope with anxiety and lessen their dependence on other substances. But it’s also a story of Stevie’s own ego death. In the nineties, after Stevie was finally completely clean, she could at last get back in touch with why, at the purest level, she’d wanted to be a musician in the first place.”

Lesson Thirteen: Only You Can Save Yourself

Writers do not thrive on drugs like Klonopin and Prozac. It takes your soul; it takes your creativity; it takes your love of running home at night and getting out a typewriter or getting out your paper and pencil and writing something that you love. It takes that away. You don’t care anymore . . . And that’s horrible to me. One of the few things that I’ve never not done in my life is not care. And I didn’t care for a long time.

—Stevie Nicks, CDNow, 2001

The hedonism of the 1960s and ’70s can’t be overstated. Drugs. Sex. Drugs before sex. Sex while doing drugs. As a child of the D.A.R.E. generation, I can’t pretend to know much about it beyond what I’ve seen in movies and read in archived interviews. My primary takeaway about the mind-bent sixties and seventies is that substances were so ubiquitous and free-flowing that they were just normal.

For Stevie Nicks, who came of age in the sixties and shot to rock stardom in the seventies — decades defined by endless partying with fountains of alcohol, strips of LSD, loopifying Quaaludes, magic mushrooms, and lines of cocaine, among other intoxicants — the singer fell right into the scene. She barely made it out alive.

Famously, Stevie’s substance of choice was cocaine, which flowed backstage along with champagne. Coke had an emboldening effect on Stevie, who appreciated the boost in courage as she stepped onstage to perform, participated in interviews, went in for costume fittings, and sought distraction from the growing isolation that comes with global fame — all the pressures that came along with her newfound rock star status. “I used to carry a gram of cocaine in my boot at all times,” she later told Oprah’s Master Class. “And it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought of before I went to bed.” And speaking of going to bed, Stevie’s purse was also allegedly full of tranquilizing pills like Quaaludes to help her catch a few hours’ sleep before the circus started again.

Though Stevie didn’t indulge much prior to joining Fleetwood Mac, her recreational usage started increasing after she teamed up with the group. But her overreliance kicked into high gear as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours took off. At one point, she was spending millions on the white powder, which was burning a literal hole in her nose. “All of us were drug addicts . . . but there was a point where I was the worst drug addict,” Stevie told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I was a girl, I was fragile, and I was doing a lot of coke. And I had that hole in my nose. So it was dangerous.”

Though her substance use wouldn’t reach the breaking point until the mid-eighties, Stevie experienced a flood of health issues and near misses well beforehand. Her consistent cocaine usage was influencing her already husky voice, deepening it to the point where one Rolling Stone critic likened it to Linda Blair’s demon-possessed snarl in The Exorcist.

On the evening prior to the Rumours world tour, Fleetwood Mac received news that their album had just gone platinum. They were so elated that they took off partying in a blowout celebration that lasted almost two days. Stevie got so caught up in the madness that she forgot to take out her contact lenses, which damaged her corneas, nearly blinding her. The band’s tour manager, John Courage, had to carry her out onto the stage on his back. She also had to avoid looking at the stage lights during performances. Soon, a doctor told her to bandage her eyes to let them heal so she wouldn’t go blind.

Stevie has always claimed to have poor eyesight, but the contacts incident arguably made a bad situation worse. “I got diagnosed with this thing a year and a half ago called wet macular degeneration, and it is not a good thing,” Stevie told Rolling Stone in 2024. (It should be said that AMD is a common age-related condition and is the leading cause of vision loss among people age fifty and older. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but Stevie’s lifetime of eye issues probably didn’t help.) “I was seeing all these colors, big things of purple. I was having, like, acid trips. And I’m going, ‘I’m not taking any acid, so I don’t understand what this is.’ Now, every six, seven, eight, nine weeks, I have to have a shot in each one of my eyes. That’s going to be for the rest of my life.”

Stevie’s drug use also had a crippling effect on her romantic relationships, though she wasn’t at all alone there. She and Mick fell into each other’s arms through a mutual haze of alcohol and cocaine, and Stevie’s earth-moving romance with Joe Walsh was famously unstable owing to the collective amount of substances both took in.

As the mid-eighties set in and Stevie readied her next solo album, Rock a Little, the singer was visibly unwell. Keith Olsen, one of the album’s producers, grew upset with Stevie because she was too high to sing in tune. After recording “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You,” he stormed out of the studio and quit on the spot. Jimmy Iovine, Stevie’s Bella Donna and The Wild Heart producer (and a romantic partner), also walked out. Stevie also struggled to film the videos for the singles “Talk to Me” and “I Can’t Wait,” which had her climbing and descending a staircase, which she almost fell down.

Speaking of that experience, Stevie later said that while she loved “I Can’t Wait” and its accompanying video, “I look at my eyes, and I say to myself, ‘Could you have laid off the pot, the coke, and the tequila for three days so you could have looked a little better? Because your eyes look like they’re swimming.’ It just makes me want to go back into that video and stab myself.”

On the Rock a Little tour in 1986, Stevie’s condition appeared more troubling than ever. Her performances were hit-or-miss; worst case, she’d be slurring her words and literally falling offstage. Her nose bled often. Rumors abounded about the hole in her nose, how she’d been inserting cocaine vaginally and anally.

When the tour reached Red Rocks Amphitheater near Denver, Colorado, Mick was there to join Stevie on percussion. But her haggard appearance frightened him so much that he took her aside for a heart-to-heart. “I don’t want to be like this,” Mick recalled Stevie saying when he spoke to the author Stephen Davis during the writing of Gold Dust Woman. “I don’t want to need this stuff so much. I’m going to do something about it.”

When the Rock a Little tour concluded and Stevie was back in Los Angeles, her team staged an intervention. It wasn’t just the cocaine that had become a major problem — Stevie had been relying more and more on alcohol and various other methods of self-medication, including snorting aspirin dissolved in water to help with her migraines. “I thought I was being the best, most hygienic nurse ever,” she told Rolling Stone in 2015. A doctor told her that the hole in her nasal cavity could cause a brain hemorrhage the next time she used. The longer Stevie went without getting help, the likelier it was that she’d die. Friends even began to anticipate getting the dreaded phone call. “I did all I could to talk her into getting some help and getting right,” Tom Petty told Rolling Stone. “I was very worried about her. To the point that if the phone did ring and they said, ‘Stevie died,’ I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

Around this time, Stevie wrote “Mabel Normand,” which chronicled her addiction and later found its release on 2014’s 24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault. Named for the Hollywood actress who died of tuberculosis in 1930 after many years of cocaine and alcohol addiction, “Mabel Normand” was Stevie’s reflection on her own disease — and how close she came to death. “In 1985, I was dancing at the edge of danger myself, just like she was,” Stevie told Out magazine. “I was just doing so much coke. And it had already backfired on me completely. I saw this documentary, and I felt this union with her: Oh my God, the same thing that happened to this woman in the twenties is happening to me in the eighties — how can this be? Then she died, and that really scared me. She was rich, she was famous, she had everything. She had it all. And I very well could have died just as easily as she did. That’s when I wrote the song. Less than a year later, I went to rehab at Betty Ford.”

“Mabel Normand” was not just a warning from Stevie to herself — she hoped it would speak to anyone else struggling through addiction. “I wanted it to be something that somebody having a problem with drugs can sit down and listen to five thousand times,” she continued in 2014. “Try and let it be an epiphany for you, eighteen-year-old person that is doing a lot of coke and smoking heroin and taking ecstasy and is on a dead-end road to hell. I want them to hear the word ‘cocaine’ and think brain hemorrhage, beauty gone, lines, aging, fat.”

Stevie described her decade of alcohol and drug use as a “wicked little circle; a rat’s wheel” of “brandy, cigarettes, pot, and coke. You’d do some coke and you were nervous, you’d smoke some pot to calm down, you were too stoned, and you’d do some more coke to wake up, and you’d have a drink because you were too nervous . . . it was just a nightmare.”

When Stevie checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, she used the name Sara Anderson. The facility was no vacation, either. Part of treatment included manual labor, like mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms (something Stevie had once done plenty of in her pre–Fleetwood Mac days). Later, she likened the experience to “the army. Betty’s army. This is not celebrity rehab. This is hardcore rehab. There’s nothing fun about it. It’s not a spa.”

Stevie chronicled her experiences in rehab on “Welcome to the Room . . . Sara,” which appeared on Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album Tango in the Night. She wasn’t as forthcoming with the press about the percussive song’s meaning, preferring to talk around the subject rather than directly address it.

“’Welcome to the Room . . . Sara’ is very much a secret kind of song,” she told Creem magazine. “Sara is from Tusk, that’s the same Sara we’re talking about—and she just has some experiences that she’s talking about. I don’t really want anyone to know whether I’m going into her room or she’s coming into mine, or what’s in the room. This room is an ominous room. I’m not Bob Dylan, but every once in a while, I’ve gotta say something.” (Mick Fleetwood revealed what “Welcome to the Room” was really about in his 1990 memoir, Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac.)

While Stevie emerged from the Betty Ford clinic cocaine-free, and managed to stay off the powder, she had a lot of work to do in terms of regaining the industry’s full trust. At one time she had been perceived as the main attraction of Fleetwood Mac, but by the late eighties Stevie’s team were all but certain she would succumb to her addictions. Even post-rehab, they weren’t confident she’d stay clean — especially if she went on tour with Fleetwood Mac to promote Tango in the Night.

But Stevie wanted to keep working, and she had no interest in going to Alcoholics Anonymous, “because I wasn’t an alcoholic.” To accommodate her, Stevie’s team of doctors, management, and advisers recommended that she start seeing a therapist, which she did. Stevie began seeing a well-known psychiatrist in Beverly Hills who suggested she minimize the possibility of a cocaine relapse by taking benzodiazepines—first Valium, then Xanax, and finally Klonopin.

At first, she appeared happy and lighter on her feet, even though many in her orbit thought she also seemed in a bit of a haze. When Stevie released her fourth solo album, 1989’s The Other Side of the Mirror, she claimed it was “probably my favorite album. I had gotten away from the cocaine. I spent a year writing those songs. I was drug-free, and I was happy.”

It would take eight years before Stevie would realize what Klonopin had taken from her: creativity, verve, ambition, focus. When she told her psychiatrist about the anxiety she felt about writing new material for The Other Side of the Mirror, the doctor simply increased her dosage.

“It’s a very subtle drug; you just don’t feel it much, or so you think. On the bottle, it says: ‘Take as needed.’ That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. So you think: ‘Well, I need it every two hours.’ It’s addiction in a bottle,” she told The Guardian. “It was a totally non-time. I just existed. It took away all my wonderful drama, my tempestuousness, my compassion, my empathy—all those things that drove me to my piano. I say to myself now: ‘How did you survive eight years without your wonderful drama?’”

Stevie faced wave after wave of criticism in the late eighties, which no doubt fueled her growing Klonopin dependency. Reviewers had brutal things to say about her live shows; they chastised her weight gain, her corseted stage apparel, her too-big hair, her caked-on makeup. Reporters shouted rude and invasive questions about her time in rehab. Visibly exhausted, she’d recently been diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus. Fans and the industry at large seemed to doubt her viability as a performer and were starting to regard her as a washed-up has-been. All because she had the audacity to be a female pop singer over forty.

Also, Fleetwood Mac was falling apart again. Lindsey had left under extremely unpleasant circumstances in the summer of 1987 when he refused to tour Tango in the Night. When confronted by the rest of the band (including Stevie, who pleaded with him to reconsider), Lindsey grew irate and allegedly slapped his onetime musical partner across the face and tried to strangle her. “He’s a thing of my past,” she later told the BBC. “I hope he finds what he’s searching for, and I hope he’s happy, and I wish him well. And there’s nothing left to say.” Stevie left the band a few years later and returned only once, in 1993, to perform “Don’t Stop” with the band at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration.

As Stevie prepped her fifth album, Street Angel, her issues with Klonopin worsened. She felt it was making her look older than she was, she was always cold, and she’d developed tremors in her hands. “I was shaking so hard that people would look at me like I had Parkinson’s disease. And then I’m starting to think, do I have some kind of neurological disease, and I’m dying?” Stevie asked her doctor, what if we decreased my dosage? But he replied that decreasing her Klonopin dosage would only make her “nervous.” Plus, lots of famous singers take it: Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Prince, others. You’re in good company, Stevie. What if instead I increase your dose?

Stevie was at a loss. She never realized the addictive nature of benzodiazepines; she’d simply been taking the drug as prescribed. “Like Vitamin C,” she told VH1.

“This doctor was a groupie — he just wanted to hear me tell stories about rock and roll,” Stevie also told Rolling Stone. “So he kept upping my dose for years. Finally, I said, ‘I’m taking enough Klonopin every day to sink a boat. That’s why I gained all this weight, and that’s why my writing is terrible, and that’s why The Other Side of the Mirror was the last good record I made. This was all your idea.’”

The real tipping point came near the end of 1993. Stevie was hosting a baby shower at home and standing near the fireplace hearth. She blacked out and woke up “curled up by the fireplace…..I’d hit my head but felt no pain.” Her guests quickly got Stevie into bed. Later, she got out and had a look in the mirror. “I had some blood on the side of my head. I never injure myself, so I was horrified to see that blood. I hadn’t had enough wine to pass out like that. I knew it was the Klonopin.”

Stevie had an idea. As an experiment, she asked her long-time friend Glenn Parish if he wouldn’t mind taking her current prescribed dose of Klonopin to see how it affected him. (Keep in mind, it wasn’t common knowledge yet that benzo-diazepines were extremely addictive. It wasn’t until 1990 that the American Psychiatric Association launched a task force to investigate the dangers of rising benzodiazepine prescriptions. Despite its findings that up to 80 percent of those taking these drugs would experience withdrawal upon cessation, that did little to reduce the skyrocketing number of prescriptions in the 1990s.)

Glenn started to set up a stereo but had to stop midway. “He was almost hallucinating. It was bad. Then he just passed out.” Stevie called her psychiatrist in a panic. “‘I gave Glenn everything you prescribed for me.’ And the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Are you trying to kill him?’ And the next words out of my mouth were, ‘Are you trying to kill me?’”

Stevie checked into Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Venice Beach and remained there for the next forty-seven days. Purging her system of benzodiazepines was a far more painful process than coming off cocaine ever was. Describing the debilitating detox process, she said, “It took forty-seven days for me to detox from Klonopin. It was horrible. My hair turned gray. My skin molted. I couldn’t sleep. I was in so much pain. Legs aching. Body cramps. The rock star in me wanted to get in a limousine and go to Cedars Sinai and say, ‘Give me some Demerol, because I am in pain.’ And the other side of me said, ‘You will fight out these forty-seven days.’”

Stevie fought. And when those forty-seven days were up, she emerged from the hospital with “a new lease on life.” She elaborated: “I learned so much in that hospital. I wrote the whole time I was in there, some of my best writing ever. I learned that I could have fun and laugh and cry with amazing people and not be on drugs. I learned that I could live my life and still be beautiful and have fun and go to parties and not even have a glass of wine. And I never went to therapy again.” I mean, would you go back to therapy if you’d been overprescribed an addictive, potentially life-ending pharmaceutical?

Few people in her life would likely describe Stevie as angry or a grudge holder. But she reserved whatever anger she was capable of for that psychiatrist, whom she (understandably) has in recent years referred to as “Doctor Fuckhead.”

The source of Stevie’s anger lay in the drug’s having sapped her ability to live and work with the zeal and ambition that had defined her life and career up until then. Klonopin’s tranquilizing properties took away her inherent ability to think, move, and create—everything that had ever been important to Stevie. She told 60 Minutes Australia in 2017: “In that eight years [on Klonopin], I could have had a baby. I could have had maybe an amazing relationship. I might have been married. I could have done another two Fleetwood Mac albums that were really great. Maybe I could have done another two or three Stevie Nicks albums. . . . So many things that I could have accomplished during that eight long years. I accomplished nothing. That’s my regret. If I were to see that psychiatrist on the street, I would run towards him and kill him.”

In the years after her second time in rehab, Stevie spoke passionately about the dangers of Klonopin addiction and everything she learned in her struggle to get clean. Immediately after rehab, and after releasing Street Angel, she spoke apologetically about her fifth album’s low energy. “I’d been taking Klonopin for almost eight years,” she told Time Out. “Street Angel was done in the last two years of that, when it had kicked in to the point that it took away my soul and my creativity, . . . I listened to the record—I’m off all the drugs—and I knew it was terrible. It had cost a fortune.”

In later interviews, Stevie displayed the immense insight she’d gained about why she’d leaned so hard into substances—beyond the fact that she was a rock star, and they were endlessly available and unregulated. “The truth about drugs is how they are usually a symptom of an even bigger problem—in my case, an ego out of control,” she said.

“Sometimes the biggest and most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves. With fame comes the danger of thinking that you are bigger and better than anyone else, and that you can live ‘above it all.’ Letting your ego get out of control can often bring you crashing back down to earth. Like a drug, your ego can stop you from listening to your true self . . .My true self is someone who writes and sings songs. Then I get to perform those songs—bringing them alive for other people! It’s such an honor to be able to do that: to go around the world and see how your songs—your children in a way—are so deeply loved, understood, and appreciated by others who only know you through your words and music. Sometimes it feels like a lot of work, but ultimately it’s a privilege. Too many of us who have succeeded in the popular arts have somehow forgotten that.

My best advice goes well beyond just staying away from drugs. Check your ego, too! If you’re lucky enough to figure out what you are meant to do with your life, follow that passion. For me it was music, but I had to act on that passion to make my dreams come true.”

Stevie never relapsed into either substance. She still smokes “a little bit of pot,” telling Rolling Stone: “It’s my one little thing that I can do. If I’m sitting at the piano and I’m writing, then I’m not out driving around in a car. Nobody is here, nobody sees me. I am not smoking with anybody. It’s just me, and it’s my choice. I use it as a tool, and I’m very careful, you know? And I get results. However, if I thought it was going to lead me back to something worse, I’d stop.”

Excerpted from LESSONS & LACE: Everything I Know About Dreams, Heartbreak, and Magic I Learned from Stevie Nicks. Copyright © 2026 by Rachel Brodsky. Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.