Blondie’s Debbie Harry Did Drugs to Escape an ‘Emotional Rollercoaster’ — but She Doesn’t Regret the ‘Experiences’

Debbie Harry is opening up about her drug use back in Blondie’s heyday.

Speaking with Vanity Fair for an interview published Monday, June 30, Harry revealed that she and Chris Stein — her ex and former bandmate — were “struggling with a lot of stuff” when they were at the height of addiction.

“Chris was overcoming something and we didn’t know what it was,” Harry, 80, told the outlet. (Stein later discovered it was a rare autoimmune illness pemphigus vulgaris, a rare chronic blistering skin disease.)

“We needed to do some drugs to stabilize ourselves from some kind of emotional rollercoaster. Had we gone to a shrink, we probably would have been severely medicated,” she continued. “But that also was a sign of the times, because drugs were everywhere. In my social circle, people would come over and just do drugs together.”

In the mid ’70s, Blondie was part of the underground scene in New York City that revolved around CBGB. Per Rolling Stone, Blondie performed at the venue every weekend for much of 1975.

When the interviewer pointed out the use of heroin at the venue, Harry said “a lot of it was going around, but I never got the impression that people were nodding out, sniveling old junkies.”

“It was a different atmosphere. Now, I feel it was a waste of time, but I don’t regret having had the experiences,” she said. “I can’t go around regretting everything in my life; that would be such a waste.”

In January, Louder referenced a 1993 interview Harry did with Q magazine, where she called drugs “chic” and said “everyone in New York was fooling around with drugs.”

“That’s just what the scene was like. It wasn’t like today where everybody knows what the implications are and what the results are. It was just a very small, elitist art world. Up in a loft. Look at my pictures! Aren’t they neat? Yeah? Okay, let’s do some drugs to celebrate, then. It was just a fashionable situation. The stockbrokers weren’t doing cocaine, only we were doing cocaine. It was just for freaks, and the quantities that are available now weren’t available then. It was the 1960s, man.”

“I was doing heroin,” she said. “I was taking a serious addictive substance. Actually, I should say, was taking several serious addictive substances. Plural. But, you know, at that time it was part of the scene. Everything was like, ‘Hey, man, this is the latest drug and this is the newest drug and here comes the next drug and you really ought to try this!’ So I tried it. Whatever it was.”

Meanwhile, speaking with The Guardian in October 2019, Harry said that her heroin use was a “necessary evil.”

“To some degree, it was self-medicating,” she said at the time. “It was a rough, depressing time of life and it seemed to suit the purpose, but then it outlived its benefits.”

Harry also said that she got off it “the way anybody does — go to a program or go into therapy. It’s not easy.”