Tommy Lee Recalls Drinking 2 Gallons of Vodka a Day and Shooting Booze With a Syringe

Tommy Lee is now about a year sober, but in a recent interview, the rock star recalled his heavy drinking days, which included guzzling up to two gallons of vodka per day.

The 61-year-old drummer joined Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast, where he divulged the power alcohol had over him and his Mötley Crüe bandmates. Lee shared the vodka tidbit after Maher told him what Sammy Davis Jr. once said after becoming sober — the hardest part about quitting drinking is “getting up in the morning and knowing that’s as good as I’m going to feel all day.”

“Wow, that’s an interesting one,” Lee responded. “Alcohol is such a f**king weird one too because, f**k, it’s easy to fall in love with the way it makes you feel, the way it makes you relax, and then all of a sudden you’re like, f**k, I’m drinking two gallons of vodka a day? This is not … you’re trying to kill yourself now.”

Maher was in shock when he heard this, so much so the comedian had to confirm with Lee that he was referring to himself when talking about drinking two gallons of vodka a day.

“Yeah,” Lee confirmed. “Two gallons a day. I swear to you, dude. I swear to God. Gallons. The big handle. Two.”

That amounts to eight bottles of liquor a day, Maher told him.

As for how long he did this, Lee said, “For a long time.”

The rock star, whose explosive relationship with Pamela Anderson was the subject of the Hulu series Pam & Tommy, says he now pinches himself on a daily basis because his doctor recently gave him a clean bill of health. Lee shared that he recently had a full body scan, and when the results came in, Lee said doctors told him he’s good. He said he asked doctors if they were certain because he found that “f**king impossible.”

With so much drinking in his heyday, Lee says it’s like “your liver is on crutches” and “it’s barely functioning.”

But now? His liver is fine, he says.

Lee, who is now married to 37-year-old Brittany Furlan, says he and his bandmates would do heavy drugs along with their heavy drinking. He said they’d regularly take a handful of drugs — “like Valium” — and then “pound a bottle of Jack” Daniels and then go out for the evening.

Lee also claimed that, when they’d run out of cocaine, he and Nikki Sixx would shoot Jack Daniels with a syringe.

“It was quick, faster, louder and harder,” he said. “We would do this s**t all the time. We’d run out of coke, well, let’s shoot some Jack.”

Lee, who said he started drinking before high school and dropped acid at 13, said celebrating his sobriety can be challenging.

“I make it a year,” he says, “and then I’m so stoked that I made it a year that I celebrate.”

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