Jada Pinkett Smith got real about her past substance abuse on Wednesday’s new “Red Table Talk” about alcoholism.
While Smith has been open in the past about her issues with alcohol, she revealed just how bad it got before she quit cold turkey 22 years ago, right around son Jaden’s birth.
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“Wine for me was like Kool-Aid. I was a hard liquor drinker. I could drink almost anybody under the table,” she explained, saying she could outdrink husband Will Smith “specifically,” because he’s “such a lightweight.”
“I’m used to that hard hit. I was drinking hard in high school too and when I moved out here, I was doing cocktails,” she continued, saying she would mix ecstasy, alcohol and marijuana. “What a combination!” exclaimed daughter Willow Smith, who joked she was happy to be a “regular old stoner” herself.
“I was like, ‘This is not cocaine, this is not heroin,’ I wasn’t doing things I thought was addictive but I would do those three together. That was my cocktail,” she said, adding the mix made it possible to keep her high going longer.
Though Jada said she was a “weekend party girl,” she still confessed her substance abuse did affect her day job as an actress … just once. It was a revelation her own mother didn’t even know.
“I had one incident. That was an eye-opening incident for me as well. I had one incident on The Nutty Professor, I passed out,” Jada revealed, saying it happened while she was in the makeup trailer.
“I went to work high and it was a bad batch of ecstasy and I passed out. I told everybody that I must have had old medication in the vitamin bottle.”
“I’ll tell you what I did though, got my ass together and got on that set. That was the last time,” she said, before talking directly to Willow.
“That’s why I was on you always, I stay on you, Jaden and Trey because I grew up with my mother who was a heroin addict, and still it didn’t sink into me that any mind-altering substance — I don’t care what it is, all y’all young people saying weed is from the earth — it’s a gate.”
Though Willow said she’s gotten to a point where she stops smoking every year for at least two months at a time, Jada and Adrienne Banfield-Norris were both looking forward to the day she decides to quit altogether.
“[That] will be a very happy day for me,” said Gam, who added she had some stress that her family was “not accepting of the fact that addiction runs deep in our veins.”
Speaking more about her issues, Jada said there were people who “did try to tap me on the shoulder” and warn her about her drinking. “Don’t think when I was at Debbie Allen’s throwing up all over her house that she wasn’t like, ‘Hey.’ I had to reach my rock bottoms. I was out of control.”
Smith said she could “down a bottle” of wine in an hour and a half, “one glass after another.”
“Once I was going for that third bottle of wine, I said, ‘You’ve got a problem,’ and it was a cold turkey that day.
That day I just stopped,” she said. “I’ve had a glass of wine here and there, but I cannot touch vodka. I cannot touch Courvoisier, rum, rum’s another one. No dark liquor.”
She said she stopped drinking 22 years ago and, when looking back at her life, believes she’s “a walking miracle.” She added, “No doubt about it. People would not believe,” before calling her mother one too.
Joked Willow: “I guess I’m a little fuddy-duddy on the side!”