Jacob Young has spoken publicly for the first time about a seven-year opioid addiction that began with a routine dental prescription and spiraled in secret, hidden even from his own wife.
The General Hospital actor, 46, revealed the revelation on Imperfectly perfect Podcast that traces the roots of his drug use back to a difficult childhood and describes how addiction eventually took hold of a significant part of his adult life.
“I went through seven years of my life wasted on opioids, still trying to figure out what was wrong with me, but I didn’t know,” he said.
“It just had to numb… It was the only thing that made me feel normal.”
The opioids entered his life in an unexpected way.
After he and his wife Christen Steward bought a house and settled down, Young had dental surgery and was prescribed Vicodin.
Besides having his wisdom teeth out as a teenager, he had never taken opioids before. What followed was years of addiction that he kept entirely to himself.
However, Young’s history with drugs had begun much earlier.
He started smoking marijuana around the age of 14, and it wasn’t until his mid-20s that fame from roles on All my children, General Hospital and The bold and the beautiful brought him into the New York nightlife circuit, that drinking and cocaine use entered the picture.
By the time he got married, he had pretty much left them behind. The opioids were a different story.
Finally, he sat his wife down and told her the truth, a conversation he credits as the turning point. From there, he sought counseling and medical support to cope with his addiction.
Looking back, Young associates his drug use with a childhood defined by instability.
His parents divorced and he was mixed between them in a way that left him uneasy. The family depended on welfare and food stamps, and Young grew up with three older siblings in what he described as a humble upbringing.
During his teenage years, he lived with his father, which felt stable until his stepmother, who had become like a second mother to him, died by suicide.
His relationship with his father broke down in the aftermath, and a difficult relationship with his mother at the time left him without a reliable parental figure for some of his most formative years.
“I went through things that I didn’t realize I’d ever go through, emotionally,” he said, a quiet acknowledgment of how much had been buried long before the prescriptions began.
