Lisa Marie Presley wrote about her opioid addiction in her posthumous memoir, “From Here To The Great Unknown.”
In the book, Presley – who passed away in January 2023 from a small bowel obstruction – explained that she became hooked on painkillers after the birth of her twins in 2008 and was taking an alarming amount of pills a day at the height of her addiction.
“It escalated to eighty pills a day. It took more and more to get high, and I honestly don’t know when your body decides it can’t deal with it anymore. But it does decide this at some point,” Presley, the only daughter of Elvis and Priscilla, wrote.
She continued, “I believe that we’re all born innocent, and that everyone’s nature is innately good, but they get f—ed by their surroundings. And I believe that my brain is different, that I am an addict. Otherwise, I would have had all those years in between being a stupid teenager to suddenly getting a drug habit at forty.”
Presley explained that she started taking the pills for “recreational” purposes, but it quickly became “an absolute matter of addiction.
“It escalated to eighty pills a day. It took more and more to get high, and I honestly don’t know when your body decides it can’t deal with it anymore. But it does decide this at some point.
If I had fully run out of drugs, the severity of the withdrawal would have left me either in the hospital or dead. My blood pressure would shoot up so high,” she wrote.
Presley’s daughter, Riley Keough, was also an author of the posthumous memoir. “My mother had started by taking opioids for pain after her C-section, and then she progressed to taking them to sleep,” Keough wrote.
She had turned forty in February 2008; my sisters were born in that same year (I would turn twenty the following May),” she continued. “After her brief stint with drugs as a teenager she never touched them again. She drank, but, like she said, as an adult she wouldn’t even take Advil or Tylenol.”
Keough, 35, explained that her mother often warned her of the dangers of dabbling with drugs.
“Throughout my life she would often say ‘if I tried drugs, it would be over for me.’ I see now that that was such a strong hint to an addiction issue she had an intuition about,” she wrote.
“I think it was subconscious, but it stalked her. She had been holding it back with Scientology, with raising children, with marriages, with spirituality. But it was there, like a shadow, the whole time. She’d say, ‘My dad was forty-two when he died. I’m thirty-nine….'”
Keough added, “We never could have imagined it would be something that would come for her so viciously, so late in life.”
After being hospitalized for her addiction, Presley was sent to a court-ordered rehabilitation facility in Los Angeles. Keough explained that she was being “weaned-off” the opioids with drugs like “Suboxone, Seroquel and Gabapentin.
Keough wrote that while her mother was in rehab, she decided to get bariatric surgery because her “entire life she had been harassed for being fat.”
“The surgery was something she’d always wanted,” she noted.
“It was a strange time to decide to have surgery, in rehab. She wasn’t done with her program. I remember worrying that it was a way to stay on medication a little bit longer. I didn’t feel she was ready to be sober,” Keough wrote.
In January 2023, Presley died from a small bowel obstruction, which is a long-term complication from bariatric surgery. She was 54.
