O'Neal: Cops who arrested me saved me

NEW YORK, June 3 (UPI) -- Actress Tatum O'Neal said she is grateful New York cops arrested her Sunday before she could use the drugs she bought.

O'Neal, who struggled with addiction for years, won an Oscar for the film "Paper Moon" when she was 10. She now co-stars on the TV drama "Rescue Me."

"I'm still sober!" the actress told the New York Post two hours after she was released from jail. "Just when I was about to change that and wreck my life, the cops came and saved me! I was saved by the bell, by the guys in the Seventh Precinct."

O'Neal was arrested Sunday and charged with buying crack and cocaine on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

"There's no excuse for what I did," O'Neal told the Post, then confided her Scottish terrier, Lena, died three weeks ago. "That seemed to set me off. She got old. She got cancer. She was the fabric of our family. We had to let her go to heaven. ... It was too horrible for words. I couldn't get out of it. I was going to my psychiatrist. I was doing everything I could do. I have the disease of alcoholism. It's lifelong. I treat it every day by going to my 12-step program."