How 360 Lifted Himself Out Of Addiction

At one point Colwell carried a paltry 67 kilograms on his 193-centimetre frame. Supplied.

PATIENT: 360 aka Matt Colwell, 28

EARLY WORK: Cocaine and codeine-charged rhymes
NEW MATERIAL Meditating gym junkie

The Story

The seeds of Colwell’s drug problems were sown in childhood. An obsession with basketball fuelled an addictive personality. “Whatever I take on tends to be to the extreme,” he says. Meanwhile, struggles with body image and an eating disorder hinted at issues with control. Then, just as Colwell was starting to break out musically, a disease called keratoconus saw him go blind in one eye. Throw in the sudden rush of chart-topping success and the rapper was ripe for a walk on the wild side.

The 28-year-old Melbournian started with ecstasy. “After that it was game over,” he says. Pretty soon Colwell was taking up to 20 pills over a weekend, before he started messing around with cocaine, speed and finally heroin.

“I’d smash every party drug under the sun,” he says “then find it so hard to deal with the comedown that I’d turn to prescription drugs like Oxycontin, Xanex and Nurofen Plus. Codeine was my real poison.”

For a while it was a blast. He spent an entire Big Day Out tour off his face, not sleeping for a week and a half. “I found the music I was doing at the time easy to write. I was loving it.”

It couldn’t last. Within a couple of years Colwell was no longer getting his kicks as his creativity plunged. “I found I couldn’t make music unless I was high.”

The codeine (a narcotic pain-reliever and cough suppressant) he was taking was converted to morphine in his body. Excess use results in dizziness, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain – nothing you want to rhyme about.

Colwell’s physical condition deteriorated rapidly. He barely ate and when he did he binged on Maccas. At one point he carried a paltry 67 kilograms on his 193-centimetre frame.

It took an experience Colwell nearly didn’t come back from to truly shake things up. One day, instead of taking his customary three packets of Nurofen Plus to “feel normal”, he took four and started convulsing on the floor. He woke up in hospital. “They thought I was trying to commit suicide, but I wasn’t. My tolerance was just so high that I thought I could do that much and be okay.”

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The Health Encore

After checking into rehab last year, Colwell finally got clean for good. “I’d proved that I can’t dabble,” he says.

Talking to a psychologist helped him deal with his control issues and better understand the obsessive aspects of his character. But what really helped was working out. “I bank almost everything on that,” he says.

Colwell freely admits he’s effectively substituted one addiction for another, but mainlining muscle-building has helped him achieve mental clarity and put some meat on his previously emaciated frame. He now tips the scales at 96kg.

Colwell’s other salvation has been meditation, sinking into a blank refuge each morning as he takes drug-replacement medication. “Meditating helps me calm down while the capsule kicks in,” he says.

And while it’s still early days, the rapper is confident that, this time, his recovery is for real. “I genuinely don’t want to fuck up anymore,” he says. “It was a fun part of my life but a really negative part at the same time. If I’d kept going I would surely have died.”

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