Eminem, who has been battling drug addiction for the past year or so, has an ally in his quest to get clean … in the form of BFF Elton John. Elton has admitted that he has been helping Em with his addiction in the past 18 months and claims that he is doing “brilliantly”:

Elton John is there for Eminem, who is battling a drug problem. “I’ve been helping Eminem over the last 18 months and he’s doing brilliantly,” John says, reports the British Press Association. Speaking to BBC Radio 5 in the U.K. on Saturday, Sir Elton, 62, who has freely spoken about his own past issues with substance abuse, said: “I’m there if people want my help. If people ask for help you tell them where to go but there’s no point advising people if they don’t want to do it.” In May, Eminem admitted he’d suffered from a devastating drug addiction that led to him downing as many as 20 Vicodin, Ambien and Valium in a day. “The numbers got so high,” he told Vibe magazine, “I don’t even know what I was taking. Following his first stint in rehab in 2005, the rapper, 37, said he nearly overdosed after an acquaintance gave him unidentified blue pills, which a doctor later told him were actually methadone.

We’ve been hearing about Eminem‘s on-going battle with drug addiction for some time now but I don’t know that many of us knew that he was getting so much help from Elton John. No matter where he is getting help from, it’s important for him to stay resolute in his effort to get clean and stay clean. I wonder if all this help from Elton, help that may very well save his life, will change the way Em raps about gays and lesbians in his songs. In any event, I hope he is able to save his own life because no matter how much help others are willing to offer him, it’s going to be up to him to ultimately decide his own fate.

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