Steve-O is famously sober now and believes that his experience battling alcoholism is something he is “grateful” for as it has made him a better person.
In an interview with Graham Bensinger, Steve-O explained what he means by being “grateful.”
“Yeah, alcoholism is just fucked up, you know? And at the same time, I can say I’m like legitimately grateful to be an alcoholic because as fucked up as it is, alcoholism really is, I think, the only disease where after you get the disease and treat the disease, you end up potentially better than you were before you even got it.
“Any other disease you can only hope to get back to as healthy as you were. Right, with alcoholism and because of alcoholism, when you treat it like now you can become way better than before.”
This comes in sharp contrast to his former Jackass co-star, Bam Margera, who continues to struggle with addiction, even going so far as to not be involved in the most recent Jackass film, Jackass Forever.
As Steve-O told SiriusXM in June, he had a recent phone call with Margera where, “He sounded super drunk, but he was in good spirits.”
But things aren’t all good in Margera’s camp as he struggles with accepting the idea that his alcoholism is a ‘disease’.

“It’s so fucking nuts how he’s not just resistant to the idea of surrendering to recovery but just how he literally just doesn’t seem to grasp the ‘disease concept’,” said Steve-O. “He’s like, ‘Man, if I just stay busy… it’s when I’m not busy doing stuff all the time, I get into trouble…’ It’s, like, that’s not how it works, dude. You think you would know that by now.
“I love him. I love him. And even if I didn’t love him, I’d never give up on him because, you know that’s how it works. I’ve been physically present at almost every stop of his years-long tour of rehabs and psych wards.”