Travis Barker said he gave up smoking after doctors diagnosed him with a precancerous condition of the esophagus.
“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, acknowledged that he had regularly smoked marijuana, saying, “I loved blunts and I would smoke too much.”
The musician recalled asking his doctor, who is also a friend, whether the diagnosis was serious. The doctor responded, “This is your warning shot, Trav. Don’t f–k around. You gotta stop smoking.”
Barker said he likely would not have quit without the blunt warning from someone he trusted.
The drummer joked that he once believed he could “be like Willie Nelson and smoke to the day I die, you know?”
Barker has also spoken openly about a past opioid addiction, which began in part because of 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 documentary Louder Than Fear.
He said he initially took one or two OxyContin-type painkillers before flights, but eventually reached the point where he “had to be on them” or “couldn’t even function.”
At the height of his addiction, Barker said he was taking so many drugs that he had a full-time security guard whose “only job was to make sure I was breathing.”
Shanna Moakler, who was married to Barker from 2004 to 2008, previously recalled him telling her, “I take about 20 to 30 pills a day sometimes.” Her reaction, she said, was: “How are you alive?”
Barker has described the near-fatal plane crash he survived in 2008, which killed three of his friends, as the event that ultimately forced him to confront his addiction. “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 continued. “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 said that before the crash, he smoked an “excessive amount of weed” and misused painkillers so heavily that he developed osteoporosis.
Barker claimed that during the 11 weeks he spent hospitalized after the crash, he regained consciousness during surgeries because his body had developed a high tolerance to opioids.
After leaving the hospital, Barker said he flushed everything down the toilet, “including stuff that I really needed.”