By Kayla DeKraker
Country artist Mark Chesnutt thanks “the good Lord” he won his long-time battle with alcohol addiction.
“I quit drinking, and that was a big deal for me. That was a huge thing for me. It just about killed me,” he told Fox News Digital. “There’s no other way to say it. It almost killed me.”
The singer explained how a back surgery in 2021 exacerbated his struggle.
“I just sat around and drank all the time. That’s all I could do. I couldn’t eat. I was pretty — I was miserable all the time,” Chesnutt admitted. “I started out drinking beer. That was mostly what I drank. I drank beer and some whiskey every now and then…and then I got to drinking wine…And then I graduated to the vodka and started hitting the vodka really, really hard.”
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It got to a point where he was drinking nearly a bottle of vodka a day.
“Me and ol’ Tito’s, best friends for a long time, I’d go through about a handle…It got bad.”
Alcohol abuse is incredibly dangerous.
“Worldwide, around 2.6 million deaths were caused by alcohol consumption in 2019,” the World Health Organization reported. “Of these, 1.6 million deaths were from noncommunicable diseases, 700,000 deaths from injuries and 300,000 deaths from communicable diseases. The alcohol-attributable mortality was heaviest among men, accounting for 2 million deaths compared to 600,000 deaths among women, in 2019.”
Chesnutt explained that despite getting older, he actually feels better now that he’s sober.
“When you get older, you slow down a little bit. And we don’t have the energy we had when we were in our 30s, 40s, 20s,” the 62-year-old said. “But actually, that’s what they tell me I’m supposed to feel like, but I don’t feel like that. I feel like I have more energy than I had when I was in my 30s.”
He added, “When I was in my 30s, I was drinking a lot. In my 40s, I was drinking a lot, 50s I was drinking way too much. And so, that’s when I quit. And I couldn’t get on stage and do what I did when I was drunk when I was younger. I wasn’t a functioning drunk anymore. I was just a drunk.”
Chesnutt concluded, “I feel so good now, man. I wake up every day and thank the good Lord that I’m still kicking.”
Thankfully, it’s never too late to find freedom from addiction. Galatians 5:1 says, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
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