Telepeer

How Melissa Etheridge hopes to change treatment options for addicts

December 10, 2025

There she was, strumming a guitar, singing her heart out on a stage, just as she had so many times before.

But for multi-platinum-selling artist Melissa Etheridge, this October performance at VEA in Newport Beach wasn’t just another concert. It was “Rock Jam,” the inaugural fundraiser of the Etheridge Foundation.

With celebrity pals Hugh Jackman and Ashley McBryde by her side, along with singer and philanthropist Erin Samueli, Etheridge raised $1.2 million that will go to fund research on how psychedelic therapies and plants like cannabis can be used to end opioid use disorder. Etheridge’s wife, writer and producer Linda Wallem Etheridge, along with “Scandal” actor Dan Bucatinsky, served as hosts for the intimate but high-powered event.

Melissa Etheridge, left, Ashley McBryde, center, and Shelly Fairchild perform during the Etheridge Foundation's inaugural Rock Jam at VEA in Newport Beach on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG) — Melissa Etheridge, left, Ashley McBryde, center, and Shelly Fairchild perform during the Etheridge Foundation’s inaugural Rock Jam at VEA in Newport Beach on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Yet behind the Hollywood sizzle of the fundraiser, personal heartache fuels Etheridge’s desire to find a new approach to opioid addiction and treatment: In 2020, her son Beckett Cypher died at age 21 after struggling with addiction. Out of her grief rose the foundation, begun in 2022 with a fourfold mission to fund clinical research, advocate for legalizing psychedelics for medical use, create new addiction treatment models, and educate the public.

Etheridge has written two memoirs, a stage show and hundreds upon hundreds of songs. Now this storyteller wants to tell a different tale about addiction, one that can offer happier endings. Here’s a conversation we shared about that before Rock Jam (edited for space and clarity):

What is the narrative around addiction you want to change?

Melissa Etheridge: Yeah, it’s big, because I know what I went through with my son when he was still alive. It was a couple of years of really difficult circumstances — finding that help was very limited, that you had one road of rehab. And [that one road] certainly didn’t resonate with my son, and I know it doesn’t resonate with a lot of people. It does for some. For some, it works great, and that’s fine.

Then, when I lost my son, the first thing that you feel as a parent is this overwhelming guilt and shame, and, you know, “I should have done something” and “Oh, was it the way I raised him?” Was it this, or this? It’s overwhelming. I mean, even in the last few months of his life, when I knew it was, like, he’s either going to make it or die, I kept thinking, “I have to know that I’ve done everything I can.”

But addiction, it’s such a thing of someone’s own mind. No one but that person can find their way out of it.

Then, once I did lose him, once it happened and it was in the public, I would meet people who would quietly say, “Yeah, I lost my son too,” or “I lost my daughter,” or my husband, or some other person close to them. But it was all very hush-hush, and there was such shame around it. And I was, like, this is not healthy, and it’s not helping the situation at all.

This is a situation that affects every race, every class. Rich to poor, it crosses all boundaries. And there’s just such an overwhelming desire to hide it. The numbers are already ridiculously high of how many die every year, but I know there’s more that just isn’t acknowledged, because there’s so much shame.

So let’s start with education. People need to understand that this is not “well, they just didn’t get their act together, they’re weak,” you know? The way that these drugs, opioids, work on your brain is more complicated than that.

So that’s why you started the Etheridge Foundation?

Etheridge: A couple weeks after he died, I said, I have to do something. I have to start another dialogue. I have to find the people who are trying to find another way.

I had experienced plant medicines, and I had an understanding of the health benefits they can bring. I really believed that if we could find a bridge between the addicted community and plant medicine, if we could make it okay to find alternatives, then we could move addiction treatment forward.

Talk me through how you see plant medicine as that bridge.

Etheridge: Well, the way I understand how we got ourselves where we are today is that hundreds of years ago, the church dictated that the body could be treated by medicine and science, but the soul and the spirit belonged to the church. So our modern medicine is built on just the physical body. Even today, it took them so long to admit that stress affects us! You know, I mean, it really took a long time.

The plant medicine world has existed outside of Western medicine for eons. Finally, in the 2000s, the push to legalize at least medical cannabis was the first thing that led to opening the doors of thinking that, well, this can be medicinal. Because it helped with PTSD, it helped with other conditions … and it was just the first door to plant medicine. And I tell you, every time, it’s led by the veterans. The veterans are on the front line of this — The Wounded Warrior Project, and other organizations, trying to, at the very least, get psilocybin legalized medicinally for our veterans, for PTSD, for depression.

The thing is, PTSD, depression — these are all about our inner lives, our souls, our emotions. These plants, they open your body and mind to change.

It’s been almost three years now that we’ve been funding some research, and what’s coming back is so mind-blowing. It’s beyond anything I thought it would be. The most exciting thing for me was when our scientific advisory committee got up and said, “What we’re finding is that these plant medicines — psychedelics, whatever we want to call them — they stop the pathways in the brain that constantly tell the user, “You need to use again.” And if you don’t answer this, they feel like they’re dying.

[These plant medicines] can stop that hook, at least for a while. It gives you this window of a few weeks so that you can change that neural pathway and replace it with healthy choices. And do it without withdrawals, or sickness.

It’s a new narrative, right? You change your story, you change your life.

Etheridge: Absolutely, and this gives you the strength to do that. So then, of course, it is always up to the person. This is not a “here’s a pill, go take it and you’ll be fine.” This is a plant that can stop this for a couple of weeks, and that’s when there needs to be treatment, so that you don’t start taking the addiction again. What’s so hopeful for me is there’s science behind it.

You’ve always been known for your raw emotional honesty, whether it’s in songs, your books, or your stage shows. How do you decide on that line between what you want to share, and what you want to keep private?

Etheridge: I learned this when I was playing in the bars before my first album came out — I was able to play five nights a week for five years in Los Angeles, and that’s a lot of practice! I would do two or three songs, then I’d say, “Okay, here’s an original song.” Then one night, someone came up to me and said, “Hey, will you play that song ‘Like the Way I Do’?” I was like, “That’s my song you’re requesting!” And what I realized — because that was a very personal song about something that actually happened to me, and I wrote it because I was upset — was that if I write from my own personal experience, people relate to that. Maybe it’s personal experience, but it’s a universal emotion. Especially about heartbreak, and desire, and longing. That’s universal.

So I really went into that, and would mine my own experiences. And then, the key is, when you’re talking about your own stuff, there’s always hope. I have always been a very hopeful person, so I never wanted my songs to be depressing; I wanted them to be uplifting. Even through heartbreak, there can be, like, relief in it.

Have you ever regretted putting anything out there?

Etheridge: No, no, no, no, no. I tell people, when I came out in 1993, I had already released three albums. Each of them sold about a million copies, or just under. I came out, and then I put another album out, and that album sold 7 million records. So I say, it didn’t hurt me at all. I didn’t ever look at or pay much mind to those who maybe didn’t play me because of their own prejudices. I just had no time for it. I was going to go where the positive was. I’ve never, ever, ever regretted it. No, I’m much happier, much happier.

People are often fearful that their experience won’t be understood, and I think your example is, if we’re honest about our experiences, others resonate with it.

Etheridge: Totally. And you will find great comfort in that there are a lot of people who can relate. We might think we’re going through it by ourselves, but boy, the feelings that we have of longing, of desire, of pain, of loss, of hope — everybody’s having those, every single one of us.

What would you recommend to people who long to write down their own stories, but have never given themselves permission to do so?

Etheridge: I would say to them, one, that what other people think of you is none of your business. And, two, people are never thinking about you as much as you think they are thinking about you. They’re just not. Everyone’s in their own thing. So to not do it because you think someone else is thinking something of you is just … ridiculous.

You’re in charge of your life, you really are. You can say, “That person made me feel bad,” but you make a choice to feel. We have more control over our feelings and our emotions than we think we do. Work on your own understanding, your own emotional life, and how important it is.

How Melissa Etheridge hopes to change treatment options for addicts Orange County Register

News Details

How Melissa Etheridge hopes to change treatment options for addicts

News

CONTACT INFO

QUICK LINKS

SERVICES

CURRENT NEWS