Demi Lovato has revealed she couldn’t go more than an hour without cocaine and even smuggled drugs on planes so she didn’t have to go without.
Lovato, 21, has written a memoir “Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year,” and told Access Hollywood that she was very good at hiding her addiction.
“Something I’ve never talked about before, but with my drug use I could hide it to where I would sneak drugs. I couldn’t go without 30 minutes to an hour without cocaine and I would bring it on airplanes,” she said. “I would smuggle it basically and just wait until everyone in first class would go to sleep and I would do it right there. I’d sneak to the bathroom and I’d do it.”
“That’s how difficult it got and that was even with somebody [with me], I had a sober companion, somebody who was watching me 24/7 and living with me [and] I was able to hide it from them as well,” she said. “I’m very, very good at manipulating people and that was something that I did in my disease, I would manipulate everyone around me. There were times I would just continue to lie, so that everything looked OK on the outside.”
Lovato says she realized at 19 that she had a problem.
“I was going to the airport and I had a Sprite bottle just filled with vodka and it was just nine in the morning and I was throwing up in the car and this was just to get on a plane to go back to LA to the sober living house that I was staying at … I had all the help in the world, but I didn’t want it,” she said. “When I hit that moment I was like, it’s no longer fun when you’re doing it alone. I’ve really never talked about this stuff before … I don’t know if I should be sharing this.
“I think at 19 years old, I had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh my God… that is alcoholic behavior. [It’s] no longer, I’m young and rebellious and out having fun, it was, wow, I’m one of those people … I gotta get my s–t together.”
Lovato also opened up about her eating disorder, saying it started well before she was a teenager.
“It was always there, but then I just acted on it at around 8 or 9 years old. I started overeating, compulsively overeating. I would bake cookies and then eat the whole pan. I went from doing that to being unhappy with my body. I went to just completely starving myself and that turned into throwing up and starving myself and it was just this crazy battle going on inside of me,” she said. “It got really difficult [and] I would throw up and it would just be blood and it was something that I realised if I don’t stop this, I am going to die.”
Lovato’s mom, Dianna, said she had struggled with her own eating disorder.
“I had a terrible eating disorder that I had for many, many years and I didn’t realise it and I had to face up to the fact that I was suffering as well. And a lot of what [Demi] went through with an eating disorder had to do with what she had seen growing up and I also had severe depression and I ended up asking for help actually they did an intervention with me and said, ‘Mum, you need to get help.’”
This article originally appeared on News.com.au.