Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe is sharing details about one of the most challenging times in his life.

During an appearance on the Wednesday (July 22) episode of Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard, the drummer reflected on his battle with heroin addiction during the band’s peak in the late 1980s, recounting the moment he recognized the severity of his substance use.

Lee recalled a night spent with his “bass player” — not naming the band’s bassist, Nikki Sixx — when they ran out of heroin and opted to inject Jack Daniel’s whiskey instead.

“‘What are we gonna do,’” he recalled thinking after running out of drugs around 3 or 4 a.m. The rocker then explained to Shepard how they unscrewed the cap off a fifth of Jack, filled it with alcohol, and then filled syringes with whiskey. “We were shooting Jack Daniels.”

“It was at that moment where I went, ‘OK! We could just drink this, but we’re shooting it,’” Lee reflected. “‘This is f–king wrong, and somebody’s gonna die.”

The members of Mötley Crüe entered rehab and group therapy in the late 1980s as they prepared to record their fifth studio album, 1989’s Dr. Feelgood, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the list for 109 weeks. “We all decided we needed to go to rehab or someone was going to die,” Lee stated. “People were eating handfuls of [sleeping pills] and then going out for the night. We were zombies, and people weren’t waking up. We thought, ‘Someone’s going to die soon.’” Reflecting on that time, Lee mentioned that the band moved to Vancouver, B.C., to work on the album while striving to stay sober together.

“We’d all get together and talk about how everybody’s dealing with this new arrangement,” he said. “Once you start getting into therapy with the people that you work with and that are also going through the same thing, you learn many other things about them, and it becomes really complicated at the same time.”

Lee also acknowledged that sobriety has been an ongoing journey. He told Shepard: “I think three years is the longest I’ve done.”

This conversation adds another chapter to the band’s well-documented history with addiction, which Sixx discussed in his memoir from 2007, The Heroin Diaries.

Listen to Tommy Lee’s interview on Armchair Expert below:

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use disorders, visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s website or call its helpline — available 24/7, all year round — at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for free, confidential treatment referral and resources.