EXCERPTED FROM A SPEECH Nikki Sixx delivered on Capitol Hill, Sept. 6: My father left when I was 3, my mother abandoned me at 6. I lived with my grandparents, and they traveled from job to job. I flipped back and forth to my mom and never grew roots.

I started experimenting with drugs very early. I first smoked pot at 9, and by 13 I was homeless and arrested for selling drugs and fled to Idaho to work on a farm and save money to go to Hollywood to become a rock star.

I was young, full of raging hormones and teen angst, and felt I had no family to speak of. My role models were the rock stars, poets and outlaws who abused and used drugs, and I became them.

I started this little band called Mötley Crüe and sold 45 million albums, toured the world and had a great time, destroying everything in our path, and then one day I woke up a heroin addict.

I was lucky … I had money and the ability to get into rehab. I got in recovery, but it didn’t take … Then, after many tries it finally stuck.

I want to say that we’re all here to celebrate recovery, but it’s not just about our recovery. It’s also about the family in recovery.

If we don’t get individuals and their families in recovery, the legacy of our families and future will be in addiction and everything that comes with it: financial, spiritual and emotional bankruptcy. This journey the addict is on will end in insanity, jail and death.

Trust me, I have had them all, and I’m here because I believe my higher power has more in store for me than just being an artist, but I still get to be an artist because of recovery. You get back what you give.

December 25th, 1986

Van Nuys, 7:30 p.m.

Merry Christmas. Well, that’s what people say at Christmas, right? Except normally they have somebody to say it to. They have their friends and family all around them. They haven’t been crouched naked under a Christmas tree with a needle in their arm like an insane person in a mansion in Van Nuys.

They’re not out of their minds and writing in a diary and they’re not watching their holiday spirit coagulating in a spoon. I didn’t speak to a single person today … I thought of calling Bob Timmons, but why should I ruin his Christmas?

I guess I’ve decided to start another diary this time for a few different reasons...

1. I have no friends left.

2. So I can read back and remember what I did the day before.

3. So if I die, at least I leave a paper trail of my life (nice lil suicide note).

Merry Christmas … it’s just you and me, diary. Welcome to my life.

BOB TIMMONS (Former junkie turned drug counselor to the stars who fought countless valiant but losing battles to have Nikki admitted to rehab):

By Christmas 1986, Nikki had been addicted to heroin and cocaine for at least a year, possibly longer. As a drug counselor, I first met Nikki when Mötley Crüe’s manager, Doc McGhee, called me in to work with the band’s singer, Vince Neil. Nikki was initially very hostile to me; he tried to get me barred from going backstage or being around them.

Nikki and I slowly formed a relationship, and early in 1986 he asked me for help with his own addictions. I advised him to go into a rehab center but he refused and said he didn’t need to. He was very stubborn on that issue.

Over the years I have worked with platinum-selling artists from the Rolling Stones to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and all points in between, and let me make one thing clear from the start – Mötley Crüe, more than anybody, wrote the book for decadence and partying. In that area they were the most extreme people I ever met, and Nikki was the most extreme of all. For may years, Nikki had one motto: I’m going to do exactly what I want to do, and fuck everybody else.

From The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx. Copyright @ 2007 by Nikki Sixx with Ian Gittins. Reprinted by permission of MTV/Pocket Books. For more information, visit myspace.com/heroindiaries.