Lady Gaga Says She Was Addicted to Marijuana, Didn’t Want to Die Because of It

The singer Lady Gaga told a local New York
morning radio DJ that she had been addicted to marijuana.
People first
reported:

“I have been addicted to it and it’s ultimately related
to anxiety coping and it’s a form of self-medication and I was
smoking up to 15-20 marijuana cigarettes a day with no tobacco,”
she said on Elvis Duran and The Z100 Morning Show. 

“I was living on a totally other psychedelic plane, numbing myself
completely, and looking back I do see now that some of it had to do
with my hip pain. I didn’t know where the pain was coming from
so I was just in a lot of pain and very depressed all the time and
not really sure why,” she said. 

Does it sound like maybe she was taking prescription pain pills
too?
Subsequent
reports don’t appear to mention it. Lady Gaga recently broke
her hip on stage, and at the end of the People write up of
the interview she’s quoted:

“The truth is that I can break, and I did. I was not
very good at breaking. I lost everything that I love. I
was in a wheelchair for six months. I did a lot of drugs and took a
lot of pills,” she admitted. 

But Gaga said she plans to “fight” her addiction, and challenge
herself to create music without the aid of mood-altering
substances. 

“I do put that pressure on myself; I have to be high to be
creative. I need that, that’s an error in my life that happened for
over 10 years. Can I be brilliant without it? I know that I can be
and I have to be because I want to live, and I want my fans to want
to live.” 

The Drug Policy Alliance
notes:

According to a federal Institute of Medicine study in
1999, fewer than 10 percent of those who try marijuana ever meet
the clinical criteria for dependence, while 32 percent of tobacco
users and 15 percent of alcohol users do. According to federal
data, marijuana treatment admissions referredT by the criminal
justice system rose from 48 percent in 1992 to 58 percent in 2006.
Just 45 percent of marijuana admissions met the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for marijuana
dependence. More than a third hadn’t used marijuana in the 30 days
prior to admission for treatment.

Drug courts are
often a paradox, trapping non-violent “offenders”with the
choice of being criminals or sick. The danger with comparing
marijuana to the perfectly legal tobacco and alcohol is the desire
of some authoritarians to
ban it all.

As Brian Doherty
noted about the feds characterizing spending on a purported
cure for marijuana addiction as something with a clear medical
need, “there is certainly a clear institutional need on the part of
the drug treatment industry, Big Pharma, and an American government
on all levels that is going to be more and more troubled by the
realities of human beings enjoying smoking a plant that hovers
between commodity, medicine, and menace.”

A review in the Washington Post,
incidentally, is not interested in Lady Gaga’s latest studio
effort, criticizing her for making statements about culture only in
“the most cartoonishly broad strokes.”