Free My Life With Deth by David Ellefson

to try it, but I was curious and asked him what it felt like. He said, “Dude, it’s like going back to your mother’s womb: it’s like swimming in a bowl of liver.” I also remember him telling me, half-jokingly, “Hey dude, if you really wanna be great, try some of this. If you wanna be great, you gotta do heroin!” He even made a joke along the lines of “Think about all the people that did it, like Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix.” I was thinking of Janis Joplin and Sid Vicious, who both died of overdoses. Eventually my curiosity won out, and I decided to try some.
    I discovered that snorting heroin brought me down off cocaine. Soon I was doing heroin as often as I was also doing coke. It was like that with a lot of things: the first time I drank I thought, “This isn’t bad—it’s awesome!” Then a couple of months later I tried pot and I was like, “This is awesome, too!” Then I did some cocaine and I thought, “Okay, this feels kinda funny—but I’m not dead, and I’m not in jail, so it can’t be that bad.” They teach you in high school that every drug is a gateway to the next drug, and they’re right, because the next thing I knew, there I was on heroin.
    Chris Poland (ex-Megadeth):

    David was sober up to the point when there was no way he could be sober anymore, because there was too much bad stuff going on that he got involved with. He wasn’t a bad person, but he got dragged into bad situations.
    I remember very clearly in 1984 when Combat Records put Megadeth under contract. We got an $8,000 advance and went into the studio in December of that year to record our first album, Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good! It was around this time that I finally realized that I had a problem with heroin. I’d been partying a lot, and doing smack and coke for a few days in a row, on and off for several months. Then one day I didn’t do any—and I woke up feeling really crummy. I snorted up some heroin, and all of a sudden I felt great. That’s when I thought, “Uh-oh . . . I think I understand why our guitarist and drummer have to score before they rehearse.” It was about “getting well,” as we called it; or “getting the monkey off my back.” I’d stepped over a line I never thought I would cross. I was becoming a bona fide addict after only a single year in Los Angeles. By mid-1984 I was drinking, smoking pot, using cocaine, and taking heroin. Those became my Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
    I was never a huge fan of psychedelic drugs. I took acid once and didn’t really enjoy the effects. The next day I was in a very deep, reflective frame of mind: sometimes I wonder to this day if that one trip changed me permanently. I became a much more thoughtful, cautious character afterward, and not in a good way. My one experience with mushrooms was absolutely horrifying. Never again.
    I could feel the drugs interfering with my vision for my life and my passion for rock ’n’ roll. Other people could handle it. I felt as if I’d sold my soul.
    Meanwhile, we made the first Megadeth album. Eight thousand dollars wasn’t a lot to make a record with, even back then, and we probably spent half of it on lifestyle and living expenses. We moved in with our coproducer Karat Faye, who had once been a staff engineer at the famed Record Plant. He had big stories about the rock stars he’d met in the business over the years, which impressed me.
    Scott Ian (Anthrax):

    I think I first met David in the summer of 1984, when Anthrax played in Los Angeles for the first time, at the Country Club in Reseda. I have pictures of us backstage, where Dave Mustaine played me recordings of the Killing Is My Business . . . tracks. Whenever I’ve met Ellefson, he’s always been the nicest guy. He’s a sweetheart and a great bass player. The fact that he was playing with a pick, when most bassists in the genre were using their fingers, and [that] he didn’t simply follow the guitar part like