Kirstie Alley has made no secret of her past cocaine addiction, but in an interview with Howard Stern Wednesday, the actress revealed what drove her to use the destructive drug in the first place.
Sitting down with the radio host to promote her new show, "Kirstie," the 62-year-old actress admitted that she was almost instantly hooked on the drug the first time she tried it -- and that she took it around the time of her separation from her first husband, Bob Alley, in 1977.
"I didn’t do drugs until I was 25," Alley said. "I got a divorce from my husband, and I started hanging out out with this guy I was sort of madly in love with. He had already done all of his drugs, but he had a lot of druggie friends.”
"I had heard that cocaine made you peppy and happy and I was sort of depressed because I had gotten a divorce and wrecked everybody’s lives. So I thought, 'I’m gonna try this,'" she recalled. "I took one snort of cocaine, and I go, 'Oh my God! I’m gonna do this every day for the rest of my life!'"
Alley added that dabbling in the drug quickly escalated into an addiction.
"I did a lot of cocaine. I was crazy," she said.
The actress -- who credits the Scientology rehab program, Narconon, with helping her overcome the nearly three-year addiction -- has opened up about the darkest days of her addiction before.
In November 2012, the TV star told Entertainment Tonight that her use of cocaine got so bad, she feared it would kill her.
“I thought I was going to overdose almost every time," Alley said. "There was about a year’s span that I did cocaine that I was doing it -– you could say –- more occasionally, on the weekend. Then my weekend became a three-day weekend, then it became four, then it became five. I would do so much at a time that I would snort the coke and then I would sit there, I would take my pulse [thinking]: ‘I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.’"
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