Eliza Dushku has opened up about her struggle with substance abuse, saying that she’s now eight years sober.
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” alum Dushku detailed her battle with addiction while addressing students at the NH Youth Summit on Opioid Awareness on Tuesday, saying, “Something that a lot of people don’t know about me is that I’m an alcoholic, and I was a drug addict for a lot of years.”
While acknowledging that she will always be an addict, the actress said, “The difference between me and an alcoholic or an addict that still drinks [or] does drugs is that I’m sober. And I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs anymore.”
Dushku, who said that she’s been sober for eight or eight-and-a-half years, shared that she embarked down the path to addiction at 14, probably starting with marijuana.
“I loved the first time I took a drug because I loved the way it made me feel, I made the way it made me not feel, I didn’t have to feel,” Dushku told the crowd. “It was fun and I loved it until it wasn’t. drugs didn’t love me, they didn’t love my family, they definitely didn’t love my friends that died — I have a lot of friends that are dead.”
Dushku, who said that she initially got sober for her family, recalled that she went through a period where “I felt so sick about myself, I was depressed, I didn’t like myself.”
As for those in the crowd who might be grappling with drug use, the actress told the assemblage, “If you’re in trouble all you have to do is just say, ‘I need help,’” acknowledging that it was “the hardest thing in the world for me to ask for help.”
Watch Dushku talk about her troubled past in the video.