Amanda Bynes: Be Careful With Drugs Because You Could ‘Lose It All Like I Did’
Amanda Bynes was among a circle of female celebrities in the late 2000s and early 2010s who were unfairly scrutinized by tabloids. For a while, it felt like every misstep—or just human moment—from Bynes was captured by the paparazzi and splashed across blogs. Criticizing her behavior became a vicious (and lucrative) sport, but Bynes stopped supplying fodder when she enrolled in fashion school in 2014, effectively disappearing from the public eye. She gave a brief interview last year to Hollyscoop, where she opened up about her well-documented tweets and previous experiences with drugs. In a new story from Paper magazine, though, Bynes delves deeper into her past.
“I started smoking marijuana when I was 16,” the actress says. “Even though everyone thought I was the ‘good girl,’ I did smoke marijuana from that point on. 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.”
Her drug use intensified a few years after. “Later on it progressed to doing molly and ecstasy,” she said. “[I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice…I definitely abused Adderall.”
It was a mixture of drugs and insecurity that prompted Bynes to abruptly quit acting in 2010, leaving her in a “dark, sad” place. This is when she started tweeting messages to celebrities—including, infamously, Drake—that she’s now “ashamed and embarrassed” of. “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,” she says.
Bynes 100 percent credits substance abuse to her behavior in those days. “I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act,” she says. “When I was off of them, I was completely back to normal and immediately realized what I had done — it was like an alien had literally invaded my body.” She adds, “I know my behavior was strange, so people were trying to grasp at straws” figuring out what was going on.
Bynes is now four years sober, about to start work on a bachelor’s degree, and has a positive outlook. “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,” she says “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.”
She continues, “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. Be really, really careful because you could lose it all and ruin your entire life like I did.”
Read Paper‘s full interview with Amanda Bynes here.
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