NEW YORK (AP) — Amy Winehouse’s father says the fight to get her off drugs often turned physical, as he tussled with the drug dealers and gangsters who were supplying his daughter with them.

“I spent my time fighting with drug dealers, and I mean proper fighting,” Mitch Winehouse said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press. “And I’m a middle-aged man, who is overweight, having fistfights with people.”

Winehouse said his daughter finally budged once she saw how hurt her family was: “She witnessed all this stuff going on, of how her family and her friends were fighting gangsters and she decided she didn’t want to put her family in that position anymore.”

Amy Winehouse, who had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, was found dead at her London home on July 23. Her father is launching The Amy Winehouse Foundation on Wednesday, which would’ve been the singer’s 28th birthday.

Mitch Winehouse said there were some negative influences in the group that surrounded Amy. He said he was naive about her drug use early on.

“I didn’t know the extent of her problem until maybe four months before she decided to quit,” he said.