Former child star Corey Haim appeared in such films as Stephen King’s Silver Bullet, The Lost Boys, Lost Boys: The Tribe and Crank: High Voltage. He and Corey Feldman became inseparable best friends after the success of The Lost Boys and inevitably found themselves struggling with substance abuse.
Once sober, they tried to serve as teen examples of what can happen when addicted to drugs. They would never be the same.
The Two Coreys, a television show that debuted in 2007, showed them as adults living together struggling to find movie roles with forced humor. Not surprisingly, it was canceled after its second season.
By then, Haim was battling medical issues, including gaining an enormous amount of weight, and was in and out or rehab. But in 2008, he told Variety magazine, “This is not a stunt, I’m back. I’m ready to work. I’m ready to make amends.”
This simply did not happen.
He also discussed his past with drug abuse with a British newspaper called The Sun in 2004.
“I was working on Lost Boys when I smoked my first joint,” Haim said. “I did cocaine for about a year and a half, then it led to crack.”
At rehab, Haim developed an addiction to prescription medication such as Valium and also said he, “started downers, which were a hell of a lot better than the uppers because I was a nervous wreck. But one led to two, two led to four, four led to eight, until at the end it, was about 85 a day.”
At around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday morning in L.A., Haim’s mother found him. He’d been suffering from flu-like symptoms and while getting out of bed, he felt weak and fell to his knees.
She called an ambulance, but Haim was pronounced dead at 2:15 a.m. at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank. The hospital wasn’t far from the apartment he was sharing with his mother.
Authorities didn’t find any illegal drugs, but four prescription drug bottles were lying around the house. His struggle with life after drugs left him in such a state that was so unhealthy that it finally killed him. Both are highly possible, although specifics are not known at this time.