Russell Brand

And indeed, the spiritual experience and the experience of knowing Christ is an altered state.

You look at reality differently now, hopefully through his eyes and back into his eyes.

Now, as a crack addict and a heroin addict, really what you're trying to do is anesthetize, medicate, and I sort of say defibrillate the dead world, the dead world, into some sort of state of meaning, some sort of vitality.

Now, that's not mine.

That's what the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and groups that have formed, and fellowships that have formed,

to give a spiritual, to induce a spiritual experience in the addict, sort of with the assumption that they're having a spiritual experience anyway.

If you think about it, a drunk, like a proper drunk or a proper junkie, they're outside of the world.

What's up with him at the party, at the wedding, at the funeral, in the office?

They're set apart.

They're set apart wholly in a sort of way, in an inverted way.

So me, when I got clean and sober from drugs and alcohol when I was 27 years old,

years old by the grace of God, I began to recognize that there was an alternative path.

And then, you know, and unlike with Christianity, where I've sort of jumped into it face first, mouth open, I very sort of tentatively was like, all right, I'm just going to do enough because crack and heroin, you can see that stuff's going to kill you quick.

And if not kill you, it's going to impede your pursuit of worldliness, which is

was my religion then.

I wasn't famous.

I wanted to be famous.

I'm 27.

A lot of people don't know because if things get all muddled up and obviously, why would they care?

But I was clean.