Pill-popper-in-chief
Ex- Details editor reveals addiction
In 2001, Dan Peres — then the celebrated editor-in-chief of the men’s magazine Details — was at the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) awards at Lincoln Center. He slipped away to the men’s room to privately wash down a Vicodin only to be caught hunched over a sink by Tom Ford, who was being honored as the womenswear designer of the year. Peres tried to explain it away as a Tylenol. “Yeah, right,” said Ford. Peres was all alone, however, the time he accidentally dropped a few Vicodins on the ground beneath a Waldorf Astoria urinal. “Does the five-second rule count for pisssoaked drugs?” the editor asked himself. He decided that it did.
These and other indignities are revealed in Peres’ book, “As Needed for Pain: A Memoir of Addiction” (HarperCollins), out Feb. 11.
“People may be surprised by the book,” Peres told The Post. “I didn’t present as an addict and didn’t look like what an addict would be.”
But he certainly behaved with the wild abandon of a junkie. Once, while in Los Angeles for a spot on TV’s “Politically Incorrect,” the editor traveled to Tijuana and smuggled 1,000 Vicodin back over the border.
“Feeding the addiction was my only priority,” he said.
Like a lot of addicts, Peres was first exposed to opiates while recovering from an injury. In 1995 he had ruptured a spinal disk while doing a cartwheel — an attempt to impress a woman, he writes. A doctor gave him a supply of around 60 Vicodin; his back pain dissipated but his opiate dependence skyrocketed.
By 2003 he was taking some 60 extra-strength Vidodin a day.
To keep up with his ever-increasing needs, he would juggle three pain-management specialists at a time, supplementing with new doctors as needed.
Peres once nodded out during an interview with a job candidate. Another time, when he got dope sick at his office, he puked into a trash can and tried to hide the stink by burning scented candles.
He writes about once almost going into withdrawal when he tried to abstain before meeting with thenCondé Nast boss Si Newhouse. “I had pills in my pocket, but wanted to be clearheaded,” Peres recalled.
Later that day, finally loaded on 15 Vicodins, Peres met boxing champ Mike Tyson to discuss an upcoming story. Sweat-soaked and “swaying back and forth,” Peres made it outside and vomited on the street where a town car waited for him.
Things turned extra-scary in 2003, when his girlfriend — nicknamed Chickpea, for the lie he told about meeting her in a supermarket aisle instead of through an escort service — couldn’t wake him for two minutes. “You weren’t breathing,” she told him. “I thought you were dead!”
Even that was not enough to scare him straight. By 2004 his addiction had spiked to the point that 7.5 milligram tablets of extra-strength Vicodin failed to stave off withdrawal. So he graduated to purer, more potent 15 milligram tabs of Roxicodone.
But soon after landing in Los Angeles for a business trip, he found himself out of drugs.
Sitting in his room at L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills, Peres spent the day frantically seeking a doctor who would provide a prescription, to no avail. That night, he was jonesing hard at a party for his magazine when a rock star saved him with some OxyContin that they snorted together. Later, Peres nearly got his legs busted trying to score heroin on Skid Row.
In the midst of all this, he met “24” actress Sarah Wynter, the woman he would marry in 2005. During their honeymoon in Cabo, Mexico, he made up an excuse that he needed to go to a local printing office to review some work. Instead, he writes, “I jumped in a cab and told the driver to take me to the nearest pharmacy. It wasn’t until we went to the fourth one, miles away from the beach and the swanky hotels, that I found what
I was looking for.”
After a decade, Peres finally got clean thanks to a friend he’d grown up with in Baltimore, who flushed his drugs down the toilet and took him back to Maryland — where, Peres says, he detoxed, cold turkey, under the watchful eye of his mother.
While Peres was getting clean, he had to call Ben Affleck to apologize for something the star didn’t agree with in a Details story.
“There I was,” the editor writes, “sitting in the den of my mother’s house, a shivering, quivering mess with a blanket wrapped around me, talking to Ben Affleck.”
Though Peres — who stayed with magician pal David Copperfield while getting clean — relapsed briefly, he finally quit drugs just three weeks before the 2008 birth of his first son. He and Wynter, who split in 2014, now have three boys.
Details folded in 2015, and Peres, who lives in Westchester, went on to work as a media consultant. Last year, he was supposed to relaunch Gawker.com before its owners pulled the plug. Now he’s writing and consulting again, and staying sober.
“My sobriety now is as important to me as fueling the addiction was all those years ago,” Peres said. “I am a dad with three amazing sons. They have known me only as a sober man. I have a lot of motivation for no one to ever see me addicted again.”