Jada Pinkett Smith Admits Drug Abuse On Set of ‘The Nutty Professor’: “Ecstasy, Weed, and Alcohol At The Same Time”

On a new episode of Red Table Talk, host Jada Pinkett Smith opened up about a wild incident on the set of her 1996 comedy The Nutty Professor. The theme of the Facebook Watch roundtable discussion was alcohol consumption among women, which led to an intimate conversation between the three women about Pinkett Smith’s personal struggles with alcohol and mixing drugs.

After calling her husband, Will Smith, a lightweight — jokingly, daughter Willow Smith and mother Adrienne “Gammy” Banfield-Norris agreed — Pinkett Smith dived into her background with alcohol. The host said that once she began drinking, she spiraled into harder drugs to stay high.

“Your threshold becomes so high that what it takes for you to get to the place you need to get to ‘It’ll take me two bottles,'” Pinkett Smith said, “to get to ‘Okay, if I do ecstasy, weed, and alcohol at the same time, I’m gonna get there faster and I can keep the high going because then I can just keep drinking ’cause I know ecstasy’s gonna last me about three, four, five hours, the weed, you know, that’s just gonna keep me just smooth, and then the alcohol’s gonna keep it going.'”

Pinkett Smith said she drank hard in high school, too, much to Gammy’s dismay, which led to more substance abuse in her early years in the industry. When Gammy asked Pinkett Smith if the drinking and drugs ever interfered with her work, Pinkett Smith recalled an issue on the set of The Nutty Professor.

“I had one incident,” Pinkett Smith said. “That was an eye-opening incident for me as well. I had one incident on Nutty Professor. I passed out. Makeup trailer.”

Shocked, Gammy pressed for more information, saying she had never heard of the incident.

“And I told everybody that I had taken–I must’ve had old medication in a vitamin bottle. That’s what I said,” Pinkett Smith continued. “But I tell you what I did though: got my ass together and got on that set. That was the last time.”

Willow, who had heard of her mother’s incident previously, made a simple vow to stay away from mixing drugs: “I would never do some shit like that,” she told her mother. Pinkett Smith then got candid about being a mother and trying to keep her children away from drugs, specifically speaking to Willow.

“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 in to me that any mind-altering substance — I don’t care what it is,” Pinkett Smith said. “All y’all young people talk about, ‘Weed is from the earth, wah dah dah dah dah.’ And I’m like this: it’s a gate.”

To round out the trio’s discussion, Pinkett Smith told one last story about her struggles with substance abuse. When Willow explained that she still plans to smoke weed, Pinkett Smith urged her daughter to stay cautious and listen to the people around her. To bring her point home, Pinkett Smith recalled a troubling moment at actress Debbie Allen‘s house.

“That’s why you have to trust the eyes around you. Because you won’t know. And that was the thing with me,” Pinkett Smith warned. “Don’t think that people didn’t try to tap me on my shoulder. Don’t think that when I was at Debbie Allen’s throwing up all over her house–”

But before Pinkett Smith could say more, Gammy chimed in.

“Lord have mercy,” Gammy interjected. “Thank you, Debbie. Jesus.”

The Red Table Talk conversation reached its end with Pinkett Smith meditating on the fact that she had to reach her “rock bottoms” in order to get over her substance issues.

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