Priscilla Presley opens about helping her son with drug addiction just weeks after the death of her grandson

Warning: This article contains discussion of drug addiction which some readers may find distressing.

Priscilla Presley has spoken out about helping her son Navarone Garcia through his drug addiction problems after he came to her shortly after the death of her grandson.

Speaking to PEOPLE, Presley explained that two weeks after her grandson Benjamin Keough had been buried following his death by suicide in 2020, Navarone came to her and asked for help getting away from the drug fentanyl.

In an interview she described how she helped her son kick his addiction, explaining that she now knows 'what it's like with someone who goes through withdrawal' and described the whole process as 'horrible'.

"A lot of people can't get through it and go right back to it. It was hard," she said of helping her son get off the drugs and stay off them.

Navarone went through 22 days of withdrawal symptoms before his mum thought he'd made a breakthrough, though several months later he relapsed with heroin and came back to her.

Priscilla Presley and her son Navarone (Paul Archuleta/Getty Images)

Presley recounted that her son came to her and said: "Mom, I want to get off drugs. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to hurt you anymore. Will you help me?"

Navarone had first tried heroin in his teens, Presley said, and she agreed to help him again and took him back into the home, where he struggled with problems from withdrawal symptoms which Priscilla, now 80, says she wouldn't wish on anybody.

She said: "He stayed at my home and I slept with him every night, and he had withdrawals every night.

"I don't wish that on anyone because there's really nothing you can do. You can't give them more drugs, that's for sure. They have to go through it."

Given her experience helping her son through both she said that heroin withdrawal was 'bad' but Navarone's withdrawal from fentanyl was worse.

Presley said she helped her son kick fentanyl, and then months later helped him again when he relapsed with heroin (Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for American Humane Society)

In her memoir Softly as I Leave You: Life After Elvis, she said that her son rated heroin withdrawal as a '6.5', but trying to get off fentanyl was all the way up to 10.

Since then her son has been 'sober ever since' and she reckons he's 'in a good place'.

Her advice to any parent helping a child kick their drug addiction was to be 'gentle and understanding' with them and to know that help 'doesn't work right away' as her son had been in rehab multiple times before getting to where he is now.

"Just keep talking to them and say, 'Look what's happening to you, look how you're feeling,'" she said

"You got to be there for them no matter what, and hopefully one day they'll come out of it. It may happen, it may not. It took a long time, but Navarone was ready. I got lucky."

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