Justin Bieber is continuing to pull back the curtain on some of the darkest times in his life and that means his dependency on drugs. Bieber debuted his YouTube docu-series
Seasons in January and has just released the fifth episode, which dives into the singer’s drug addiction and how he’s worked to improve his mental health.In the latest episode titled
The Dark Season, Bieber showed the cameras the backyard of the apartment complex in Stratford, ON where he grew up, labelling the location as the first place he smoked weed. He was only “12 or 13” at the time. “I got super stoned and then I realized I liked weed a lot. That’s when my desire to smoke weed started and then I started smoking weed for a while. I started getting really dependent on it and that’s when I realized that I had to stop,” said Bieber. “I don’t think it’s bad, I just think that for me it can be a dependency.”The episode includes candid interviews with Bieber, as well as his wife Hailey, manager Scooter Braun, and close friends and colleagues Ryan Good and Allison Kaye, who all witnessed Bieber’s addiction at various stages in his life.[video_embed id='1668251']RELATED: Justin Bieber claps back at Morgan Stewart after lip-sync comments[/video_embed]Good remembers a particularly low point when Bieber was drinking Lean, a mix of cough syrup, soda, hard candy and often alcohol. Bieber said that in addition to the drink, he was also abusing prescription pills, taking the street drug Molly and eating shrooms. “It was just an escape for me. I was just young. Like everybody in the industry and people in the world who experiment and do normal growing up things. But my experience was in front of cameras and I had a different level of exposure. I had a lot of money and a lot of things."Bieber said that he began valuing the wrong things in life. "If I get this, I'll be happy. If I do this, I'll be happy.” At one point, things were so dire that Bieber’s daily survival wasn’t a given. "My security would come into my room at night to check my pulse. People don't know how serious it got. It was legit crazy, scary,” said Bieber. “I was waking up in the morning and the first thing I was doing was popping pills and smoking a blunt and starting my day. It just got scary."Bieber said that he asked God for support to kick his pill addiction, but even after he had stopped abusing medication, Bieber had yet to ‘put in the work’ to get to the root of what caused his dependency.Raised primarily by his teen mother Pattie Mallette, Bieber said that his rocky childhood didn’t provide the tools he needed to be able to deal with obstacles as an adult. “These are things that I think a lot of people with secure households learn at a young age. I never heard that security in a family. I never had that consistency. I never had the reliability and the accountability and all these things that make you understand the way the world works," said Bieber. “I was a good kid, but I was still a shithead.”Bieber said he was often in trouble at school where he was the class clown and didn’t respect authority. “Looking back, those things kind of shape why you feel the way you feel about yourself. I would feel like I’m a bad person.”Most recently, Bieber was diagnosed with Lyme disease, first sharing the diagnosis on
Instagram in January. In the new doc, which is only available on YouTube premium, Bieber’s doctors say that singer was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder but is now receiving treatment to help remove toxins from his body and help to recalibrate his pleasure sensors that were damaged from years of drug abuse.“It feels good to share,” said Justin, adding that he’s never really spoken publicly about his addiction. “I don’t think I was ready. I don’t think I was mature enough to take responsibility and really mean it.”[video_embed id='1704629']RELATED: How to spot and help treat addiction in the many forms it takes[/video_embed]
