Amanda Bynes opened up about her past struggles with drug addiction and how she looks forward to making a comeback in acting after being “sober for almost four years.”
“I never really liked going out that much. I [only] started going out around 25 years old,” the 32-year-old actress shared with Paper magazine Monday. She also shared that she “never liked the taste of alcohol. I could not stomach it.”
“I started smoking marijuana when I was 16,” she added. “Even though everyone thought I was the ‘good girl,’ I did smoke marijuana from that point on.” (RELATED: Amanda Bynes Gaining On Lindsay Lohan For Title Of Most Troubled Child Star)
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Bynes continued, “I didn’t get addicted [then] and I wasn’t abusing it. And I wasn’t going out and partying or making a fool of myself…yet.”
But then she explained how she went from smoking marijuana to trying much harder drugs.
“Later on it progressed to doing molly and ecstasy,” the “Big Fat Liar” star said. “[I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice.”
She admitted that the one drug she did abuse on a regular basis was Adderall.
“I definitely abused Adderall,” Bynes explained.
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“When I was doing ‘Hall Pass,’ I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [more] high [that way],” the “Hairspray” actress explained. “I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines or memorize them for that matter.”
She also shared “the mixture of being so high that I couldn’t remember my lines and not liking my appearance” prompted her to back out of doing the movie.
Reports at the time claimed she had been fired, but the actress maintained that it was her choice to leave.
“I made a bunch of mistakes but I wasn’t fired,” Bynes said. “I did leave … it was definitely completely unprofessional of me to walk off and leave them stranded when they’d spent so much money on a set and crew and camera equipment and everything.”
That’s when she said things spiraled out of control in her life. She explained that she went to see “Easy A” in 2010 high and it really affected her. Bynes said she didn’t like what she saw on-screen and decided it was time to “stop acting” and leave Twitter. The two choices left her with way too much time on her hands and she would just be “stoned all day long.”
Now that she’s come through the troubled times, the young star talked about how she’s been “sober for almost four years now” and shared her advice for those who might find themselves struggling “with substance abuse.”
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“My advice to anyone who is struggling with substance abuse would be to be really careful because drugs can really take a hold of your life,” Bynes shared. “Everybody is different, obviously, but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain. It really made me a completely different person. I actually am a nice person. I would never feel, say or do any of the things that I did and said to the people I hurt on Twitter.”
“There are gateway drugs and thankfully I never did heroin or meth or anything like that but certain things that you think are harmless, they may actually affect you in a more harmful way,” she added. “Be really, really careful because you could lose it all and ruin your entire life like I did.”
Bynes continued, “I have no fear of the future. I’ve been through the worst and came out the other end and survived it so I just feel like it’s only up from here.”