What happened to Mark Ronson? Record producer opens up about health struggles stemming from drug use in memoir

In his new memoir Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City, Mark Ronson shared multiple occasions when his drug use caused him health scares. One incident stemmed from a night when he had a stroke at the age of 20. One night after taking cocaine over Ecstasy, he explained: "my chest tightened and my left arm went numb. Could I be having a stroke? At 20?" 

As he was "trembling, waiting for the panic to pass, but it wouldn’t let up," his friends found him "curled up in a corner practically catatonic" in the club and took him home.

"They tried to joke with me as we drove up Park Avenue, hoping to pull me out of my hole. I gave a faint, unconvincing smile. When we got home, [my friend] Tom gently tucked me into bed, reminding me of the English nurses who cared for me when I was hospitalized for meningitis as a boy," he writes.

He also revealed that he began experimenting with heroin when he was 18 years old.

"I was overdoing it, mixing drugs like cocktails. One night, I took heroin by accident — sort of (pass me a bag of powder and I never asked too many questions)," he writes.

However, he admitted that he was fortunate to have never gotten "completely swallowed up" by addiction, unlike most of his friends:

"The three kids who'd joined me in Alphabet City during my brief heroin phase, years back, were still struggling now. Once lively, they now moved at half speed, their faces gray and pallid. And I hated how junk drained the color from the people I loved."

Set to release on September 16, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City explores "the art of DJing with all its emotional highs and lows, the electric energy of New York after dark, and the wild, wonderful clubland characters who became my second family," according to Mark.

Mark Ronson reveals that his drug use became "worse" as he got older

Although his memoir only covers his life in the 1990s, in an interview with The US Sun, Mark Ronson revealed that his drug use became "worse" with time:

"My drug use and that side of things got even worse really, as I got older. Outside of the time of the book, I would say it was really in my late thirties, early forties and around [albums] Version and into Record Collection that I was really going the hardest."

He continued:

"I’m not smart enough to know how addiction works. I don’t know if you can ever really fully navigate that path and keep yourself from falling over the edge, where I was just lucky."

He also admitted to using drugs the "hardest" in his late thirties and early forties. Eventually, he had a moment of clarity when he "knew that there’s nothing in this" for him anymore. He further admitted to lying to himself, stating:

"'I just work really hard. So this is how I blow off steam.'I just realised, no, this is whatever you want to call it, a weakness, or this is like a way to skirt reality. I clearly liked it more than a lot of people. And then luckily less than some other people."

Meanwhile, in his memoir, he shared that although he is not completely sober, he doesn’t "fling myself at stimulation and chaos any chance" that he can get.

Mark Ronson has been married to Grace Grummer since August 2021. The couple later welcomed their daughter in 2023, followed by their second daughter in February 2025.