Amanda Bynes opens up about drug-fuelled spiral

Amanda Bynes “never liked the taste of alcohol,” and found marijuana to be her vice of choice.

“I started smoking marijuana when I was 16. Even though everyone thought I was the ‘good girl,’ I did smoke marijuana from that point on,” the former child star revealed in Paper Magazine’s annual Break The Internet issue.

“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,” she continued.

While Bynes, now 32, experimented with “molly and ecstasy” — “(I tried) cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine,” — she learned more about amphetamine drug Adderall after reading an article in a magazine around the time she appeared in Hairspray, which opened in 2007.

“They were talking about how women were taking it to stay thin. I was like, ‘Well, I have to get my hands on that,’” Bynes said, later obtaining a prescription after visiting “a psychiatrist and faking the symptoms of ADD.”

Bynes recalled how she “used to chew the Adderall tablets” in her trailer while filming 2010’s Hall Pass.

“I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines, or memorise them for that matter,” she said.

Bynes said it was “the mixture of being so high that I couldn’t remember my lines and not liking my appearance” that led to her dropping out of the film.

“I made a bunch of mistakes but I wasn’t fired. 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,” Bynes said.

The release of 2010’s Easy A also triggered Bynes’ spiral.

“I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it,” she said.

“I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me. I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things.”

She announced her retirement from acting on Twitter in June 2010.

“If I was going to retire (the right way), I should’ve done it in a press statement — but I did it on Twitter. Real classy! But, you know, I was high and I was like, ‘You know what? I am so over this’ so I just did it. But it was really foolish and I see that now. I was young and stupid,” Bynes said.

Following the decision, the star said she “had no purpose in life”.

“I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long,” she said, adding she began “hanging out with a seedier crowd”.

“I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me.”

Bynes looked to social media, where she infamously tweeted in 2013, “I want @drake to murder my vagina.” She was hospitalised on an involuntary psychiatric hold in Los Angeles in 2014.

“I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would. And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me. It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad,” she said. “Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter.”

Sober for almost four years, Bynes will receive her Associate of Arts degree in merchandise product development from FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising) in December, before beginning work towards her bachelor’s degree in January.

“Those days of experimenting (with substances) are long over. I’m not sad about it and I don’t miss it because I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act. When I was off of them, I was completely back to normal and immediately realised what I had done — it was like an alien had literally invaded my body. That is such a strange feeling,” Bynes said.

This article originally appeared on The New York Post and was reproduced with permission

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