In 2004, Macaulay Culkin was arrested for drug possession. After he and a friend were pulled over for speeding, the police found marijuana, as well as Xanax and clonazepam that he didn’t have a prescription for, reported CNN. The arrest, Culkin believed, was blown way out of proportion. “You know, I am a former child actor … I’m supposed to be a lot more f***ed up than I am. I took a certain amount of pride that I wasn’t that cliché, so it was, like, ‘Oh, great, I gave a lot of people exactly what they wanted,'” he told New York Magazine.
In reality, he wasn’t the partying, drugged-out former child star everyone assumed him to be after his arrest. When Larry King asked him about his drug use, he said, “Everything that I do, for some reason, becomes this big crazy thing, you know, even though any normal person does it. Like, yeah, I’m a kid. I had a beer, I smoked a joint. Big deal. … I never had a problem.”
But gossip about drug addiction persisted for years. In 2012, rumors swirled that Culkin was addicted to heroin, according to Reel Chicago. He assured The Guardian in 2016, “No, I was not pounding 6 grand of heroin every month or whatever. The thing that bugged me was tabloids wrapping it all in this weird guise of concern. No, you’re trying to shift papers.”
