Jada Pinkett Smith is getting candid about her past substance abuse.
During Wednesday's episode of "Red Table Talk," the "Girls Trip" star revealed that she began to dabble in drugs and alcohol when she was a teenager and those habits spilled over into her adult years. Looking back, Smith recalled one particularly "eye-opening incident" that took place on the set of the 1996 film "The Nutty Professor."
"I passed out. I went to work high, and it was a bad batch of ecstasy," she admitted. "I told everybody that I must’ve had old medication in a vitamin bottle. That’s what I said. ... But I tell you what I did though. Got my ass together and got on that set. That was the last time."
During the Facebook Watch series, Smith described her past self as a "hard liquor drinker" who moved on to red wine, which she believed was less dangerous at the time.
"Drinking red wine for me was like drinking glasses of water," she said. "Because I’m used to that hard hit. I was drinking hard in high school, too, and when I got out here I was doing cocktails. So, ecstasy, alcohol, weed. Let me tell you, I was having me a little ball."
Smith explained that she was not taking substances that she thought were addictive, but her "cocktail" was ecstasy, marijuana, and alcohol.
"Your threshold becomes so high, that what it takes for you to get to the place you need to get to, it’ll take me two bottles to get to," she said. "OK, if I do ecstasy, weed, and alcohol at the same time I’m gonna get there faster and I can keep the high going."
After her experience on the set of "The Nutty Professor," Smith said she went "cold turkey" and now indulges in just an occasional glass of wine.
"I cannot touch vodka," she added. "I cannot touch rum. Rum’s another one. No dark liquor."
Smith has not held back in her confessions. In 2017, she appeared on SiriusXM's "Sway In The Morning" and claimed she was a drug dealer when she first met legendary rapper Tupac Shakur in the late '80s. The topic came about when the actress was asked about the details of her friendship with the late rapper, whom she attended high school with in Baltimore.
"One of the things that is very interesting that I've never really said before is that when I first meet Pac – when we first met – I was a drug dealer," Smith said on the show. "That’s how we started. Then as I was coming out, something very bad happened to me. As I was coming out of the life, he was coming more into the life."
Smith explained that her and Tupac's relationship was "about survival" and not a "romance thing," which is how "most people want to connect it."
"It was based in survival, how we held each other down and when you have somebody that has your back when you feel like you’re nothing, that’s everything," she said of her relationship with Tupac. "There’s a lot of components to our story that we’ve never shared for a very specific reason. I just decided that this one little piece was important to share finally because it gives more insight into who we were. It was about survival and it’s always been about survival between us."
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Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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