Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker says he quit smoking only after doctors told him he had precancer of the esophagus, a diagnosis he says was the sole reason he was able to stop.
“I only quit because I got diagnosed with precancer of the esophagus,” Barker, 50, told rapper Kid Cudi on Wednesday’s episode of the “Big Bro with Kid Cudi” podcast. “I loved blunts and I would smoke too much.”
Barker said he pressed his doctor, who is also a friend, on how serious the condition was. The physician told him, “This is your warning shot, Trav. Don’t f–k around. You gotta stop smoking.”
Barker said that without a trusted doctor delivering that warning directly, he “would have never stopped.” He joked that he previously assumed he “could be like Willie Nelson and smoke to the day I die.”
A History With Substance Abuse
The diagnosis is the latest chapter in Barker’s long public account of addiction. He has previously described developing an opioid dependency tied to a lifelong fear of flying, saying in his documentary “Louder Than Fear” that a friend gave him a pill to ease flight anxiety early on.
“My friends knew how much I dreaded being on planes, and one of them gave me a pill to help with my anxiety,” Barker said. What began as one or two OxyContin-type painkillers before flights became a dependency so severe that he said he “couldn’t even function” without them.
At the height of it, Barker said he was taking so many drugs that he had a security guard assigned full time with one job: “to make sure I was breathing.”
Shanna Moakler, married to Barker from 2004 to 2008, said he once told her, “I take about 20 to 30 pills a day sometimes.” Her reaction, she recalled, was, “How are you alive?”
The Crash That Changed Everything
Barker has said a 2008 plane crash that killed three of his friends served as the turning point that got him off drugs, functioning as a substitute for formal treatment.
“People are always like, ‘Did you go to rehab?'” Barker told Men’s Health in 2021. “And I [say], ‘No, I was in a plane crash.’ That was my rehab. 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.”
Barker said that before the crash, heavy marijuana use combined with painkiller abuse had left him with osteoporosis. During an 11-week hospitalization that followed, he said his tolerance for opioids was so high that he regained consciousness during surgeries.
Upon his release, Barker said he flushed all of his medications, “including stuff that I really needed.”
