‘Teen Mom OG’ Star Amber Portwood Gets Extremely Candid About Her Harrowing Drug Addiction
We’re so glad she’s better now! Teen Mom OG star Amber Portwood‘s harrowing drug addiction played out during the early seasons of the MTV reality TV series, and the show actually went on a brief hiatus after she went to jail after multiple drug charges back in 2012. But now, Amber is clean and sober, and she opened up about her story of addiction and recovery in an interview on a recent episode of the Dopey Podcast.
Amber revealed that she was only 11 years her first time doing pills and she said that growing up, there wasn’t much to do in the city of Anderson, IN so kids would bring drugs from their homes to school to share with their friends.
“When I got a little bit older, 15 [or] 16 years old, I was partying, hanging out with bad people. That’s when the pills started coming in, a lot of opiates,” Amber admitted. “In my mind, I think I was just trying to self-medicate at the time, probably very depressed, so it just kind of spiraled out of control and it wasn’t til I got pregnant with my daughter Leah that I stopped doing drugs all together cause I was so scared of something happening to her. A lot of people don’t even believe me when I tell them that but it’s the truth.”
Amber went on to explain that she remained clean until her daughter Leah was six or seven months old when she started taking opiates again as medication for her back pain because she also suffers from scoliosis. That’s when she started to get addicted.
She said that her drug of choice was opiates, and said she was a “horrible opiate addict” and she would do 10 to 20 different opiate pills every day. But she didn’t realize she had a problem until she got a big reality check.
“I don’t think I identified myself as an addict until after I went to prison,” she said. Amber said that since she had multiple drug-related felonies on her record, she was sentenced to drug court which is a court-ordered rehab program but she still found a way to use drugs while she was in the program. One day, she realized that she needed to do something drastic in order to really get clean.
“So one day I walked into court, I was out of my mind apparently because I said to the judge, ‘I can’t do this anymore. Send me to prison,'” Amber said. She was originally sentenced to five years but she only served two and a half years.
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