Charlie Sheen Celebrates Two Years of Sobriety

After a tumultuous battle with drug and alcohol addiction, actor Charlie Sheen has a major reason to celebrate: he has achieved two years in sobriety.

Friends of the actor, including Tony Todd, marked the occasion on social media, commending the star on his commitment and success in sobriety. Sheen himself took to Instagram in 2018 to pay tribute to his first year in sobriety, including a photo of the pin he earned from his 12-Step group.

Hundreds of fans commented on Sheen’s post, sharing their own stories of recovery and encouraging him to keep up the fight. The post refers to the achievement as a “fabulous moment” in “[his] renewed journey.”

Sheen had very publicly gotten sober before—and had remained in sobriety for over 11 years at one point.

In 2011, Sheen was famously quoted as saying that sobriety was “boring” and that he would most likely revert to substance use. He referred to different instances and years where he had opted to be sober, and said that those periods were “inauthentic” parts of his life.

Sheen’s cycles sobriety and substance abuse have been in the public eye for decades. The son of actor Martin Sheen and the brother of actor Emilio Estevez, Sheen was accustomed to Hollywood’s pressures and scrutiny from the time he was a young teen.

Finding his own fame in movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sheen was an attractive young actor at the top of his game in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Over time, news of Sheen’s drug abuse surfaced to the media. In particular, Sheen abused ecstasy and cocaine.

His battle with ecstasy became so severe that he told the New York Post, “”Ecstasy should be called the drug from Hell – because that’s where it leaves you.”

Though it was his battle with cocaine abuse that led to serious consequences. In 1998, at the age of 33, Sheen suffered a cocaine overdose that resulted in a stroke. Later, Sheen revealed that he had injected the cocaine that caused his overdose.

Sheen’s rollercoaster of sobriety continued into the 2000s, though he eventually found stability as the star of the CBS comedy Two and a Half Men. Sheen won critical acclaim for his role as Charlie Harper, a bachelor whose life is upended when his uptight brother and preteen nephew move in.

Although Sheen’s new show was successful, his personal life suffered. In 2010, after several seasons of the show, Sheen announced he would be entering rehab. The show was put on hiatus, and Sheen returned, though his battle was far from over.

Sheen re-entered treatment several more times over the next few seasons of the show. In 2011, Sheen’s public, degrading statements about the TV show’s creator, Chuck Lorre, surfaced on TMZ. Sheen’s comments led to his dismissal from the show.

Sheen’s sobriety spiraled during this period of time, where he famously coined the term “winning”—though his personal and professional lives were anything but.

Today, Sheen celebrates what he has been able to overcome, and is very open about the rock-bottom moments that led him to this point.

Speaking of his addictions, he said, “There’s nothing left in that world. I exhausted it completely. The only thing left would be something catastrophic… Every other time (I was sober) I was led there though an intervention or rehab or a detox. This last time – the last time – I couldn’t get my daughter to an appointment she had.”

He noted that his inebriation in that moment, and being unable to take his daughter where she needed to go, caused him to reevaluate his choices—and his future.

Through his renewed commitment to sobriety, Sheen ensures that future includes being there for his children—and for himself.