Flavor Flav has suffered a "brief" relapse after four years of sobriety

In a message posted on Instagram, he wrote: "I remain authentic to who I am and a large part of the past 4.5 years for me has been my sobriety journey. I think I've been an inspiration to many that if I could get sober, anyone can do it.

"But just when you think it's easy, it ain't. I briefly relapsed. I say this to admit my mistake and publicly hold myself accountable. I am a human being who makes mistakes and it doesn't make me a bad person. I hope those who are around me support my choice to be sober."

He added: "I went back to Day 1, again. Time didn't stop, my journey continues."

Flavor Flav previously admitted his addictions left him in a "dark" and "lonely" place.

He told the Los Angeles Times: "No matter how many people you have around you doing the same thing you are, still and all at the end of the day, it's still a lonely world. It's a dark world. I just thank God for letting me make it out ...

"I feel like God let me live through that so that way I could teach people about the mistakes that I made ... and hopefully they won't make them," he said. "Drugs is easy to get on and hard as hell to get off."

He added that moving from New York to California helped him change his life, but it wasn't an easy process.

Flav told the publication: "I went to California, because I wanted to change my people, my places and my things. And as long as you do that, you're on the road to recovery ... It took me a while to recover, man. I ain't gonna lie. Took a little minute. It wasn't easy ...

"I want to try to reverse the process, because I know what it did to me and my life. And it didn't do my life good."