Russell's confession

Russell Brand has revealed that he used to smuggle heroin from Britain to Ibiza, with the drug stashed up his bum.

And he was once shot at as he went to pick up his supply from his dealers at a council estate in North London.

In his new autobiography, he comic reveals the full depth of his heroin dependency during his days as an MTV presenter – and tells how he would score drugs before flying to Ibiza, where his girlfriend lived.

‘It might seem a bit reckless to be picking up drugs on the way to Heathrow,’ he said. ‘But my need for a regular supply of narcotics would not be constrained by the exigencies of international air travel.

‘I generally travelled with drugs up my arse in the belief that if customs officers decided to pursue this unsavoury line of inquiry, my day would already be ruined, and the discovery of crack or heroin couldn't make it much worse.’

He said that on one trip to a dealer in Swiss Cottage, ‘a pellet pinged off the top of the car’ as he waited outside. ‘Someone was firing at us from inside the block,’ he said.

Brand said he would buy heroin from homeless people in London’s West End.

‘There's this secret culture of people going up and down Oxford Street, whistling and yelping to each other in a kind of tropical slang - men on BMX bikes delivering £10 bags of heroin to be purchased with grubby fists full of 50p and 10p and 2p coins; West Indian housewife-type women perambulating past Topshop, cheeks wedged with packets of smack.

‘You don't see this bustling underworld until you need to… There was one bloke whose eyes were missing. First he lost his wife, then his house, then his shoes, then his eyes; heroin is a Greedy drug, robbing you by increment first of your clothing, then of your skin; when it finally comes for your life it must be a relief.’

Brand adds: ‘I never had much trouble getting it, especially when I was working as a presenter at MTV's Camden studios. Heroin was everywhere in Camden: little blue bags the size of, I suppose, two peas. The dealers keep the bags in their mouths. When you buy one they spit it into their hand and you have to put it directly into your mouth.

‘Even though you want the heroin, a little bit of you is thinking, "Eeugh! He's had it in his mouth." After a while, though, you stop thinking that. It's a bleak day when that happens. You know that's another little boundary that you've crossed, another principle chalked off to experience, another thing you've put behind you, because there's so little in front of you.’

Brand said his addiction started affecting his work, although he often got away with it.

‘II smoked abundant marijuana, smack and crack, and drank a skinful, as well as taking four tabs of Viagra, so I could still fuck,’ he wrote. ‘At one point, I mispronounced the name of a famous DJ and fell off the stage. Boy George wrote in his Daily Express column that I had been brilliant and had done it all deliberately. The canyon between the perception of me and my actual reality seemed to be widening on a daily basis.’

Brand eventually quit drugs after being sacked from MTV for coming into the studios the day after the Twin Towers tragedy dressed as Osama Bin Laden and accompanied by his drug dealer, Gritty, who he introduced to a baffled Kylie Minogue.

His autobiography, My Booky Wook, is being serialised in the Guardian. In yesterday’s extract, he revealed how he spent a month in a Philadelphia clinic being treated for sex addiction, where he shared a room with ‘a paedophile who had eloped with his 13-year-old foster daughter’. Another patient had had sex with his wife's sister when she was 12.

The book is published on Thursday, priced £18.99. Click here to buy it from Amazon at £8.55

Published: 13 Nov 2007