American singer and actress, Demetria Devonne Lovato, better known as Demi Lovato, has opened up about experimenting with drugs and alcohol at a young age.
Lovato who turned thirty recently has always been brave and honest when it comes to sharing her journey with sobriety.
In a recent interview on ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast on Tuesday, 23rd August, she revealed bis she started experimenting with opiates when she was just 12. She noted that she turned to drink and drugs as a child because she had been ‘bullied and was looking for an escape’.
She revealed how she would regularly steal alcohol from her stepfather through her teenage years, before turning to cocaine when she was 17, which she ‘loved too much’.
Demi said she was sober for six years from the age of 20 to 26, but suffered a near-fatal overdose in 2018, causing her to be legally blind and brain damaged, after having a heart attack and three strokes while in hospital.
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She said,
“I started experimenting for the first time when I was 12, or 13,” they recalled. “I got into a car accident and they prescribed me opiates.”
“My mom didn’t think she would have to lock up the opiates from her 13-year-old daughter but, like, I was already drinking at that point.”
Demi explained that she was also being “bullied” at the time, and that through substance abuse she was “looking for an escape” — and her loved ones could see she was in pain too.
“When my mom saw how many of the pills had disappeared and how fast they did, she took them away and locked them up,” Demi recalled, before explaining that she also tried cocaine for the first time at the age of 17, which “kind of bled into me going to treatment right after I turned 18.”
Demi also opened up about the first time they tried alcohol as a teenager when they were alone, which “should have been a major red flag” regarding their struggles with addiction.
“I, like, stole beer from my dad in the fridge, my stepdad.
“I took it to my room and drank, like, four beers just to see what it was like to feel drunk. I was, like, a little 90-pound girl, so that was a lot.”
Demi Lovato appeared on the children’s television series Barney & Friends which aired from 2002–2004.
She rose to prominence for playing Mitchie Torres in the musical television film Camp Rock in 2008 and its sequel Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam in 2010.
Demi Lovato’s debut single and duet with Joe Jonas, which peaked at number nine on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 was used as the soundtrack for Camp Rock.
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