I'm not entirely sure why Dennis Quaid has penned a short essay for Newsweek entitled "My Favorite Mistake: Cocaine," but he has, so let's blow through a few lines.

  • "It started after I left college and came to Los Angeles in 1974. It was very casual at first. That's what people were doing when they were at parties."
  • "Cocaine was even in the budgets of movies, thinly disguised. It was petty cash, you know?"
  • "By the time I was doing The Big Easy, in the late 1980s, I was a mess...I'd wake up, snort a line, and swear I wasn't going to do it again that day. But then 4 o'clock rolled around, and I'd be right back down the same road like a little squirrel on one of those treadmills."

Okay, let's take a breather. I'm starting to feel, like, really high. Did he just say something about a squirrel on a treadmill? [Newsweek, photo via Getty]