Demi Lovato Recalls Harrowing Past Experience With Drug Overdose

TMZ reported Tuesday, July 24, that Demi Lovato has been hospitalized, possibly due to an accidental drug overdose. The site reports that she is being treated, but her current state is not clear.

Last October, Lovato shared her journey through addiction and recovery with her fans in a YouTube documentary. She reveals one harrowing moment, detailed below, where she spoke frankly about her history with drugs.

Then, earlier in 2018, Lovato released a song called "Sober," detailing her relapse.

Celebrity documentaries are fast becoming the new way for them to reach out directly to their fans. Whether or not they're entirely accessible in the documentary is up for debate, but at least celeb documentaries have the appearance of offering a much more candid looks into their lives.

In Demi Lovato's new documentary, Simply Complicated, which premiered exclusively in YouTube, we don't have to wonder if we're seeing Demi at her most polished: we know she's being as personal and honest as possible. Even before the full documentary dropped, the trailer featured a scene where her mental health coach gravely tells the audience, "Demi was a on road to like, suicide."

And now, we've learned some heartbreaking truths about her struggle with drug addiction. In the documentary, she opens about abusing cocaine:

"I wasn't ready to be sober. I was sneaking cocaine on planes, I was sneaking it in bathrooms, sneaking it throughout the night. I went on a bender of like, two months, where I was using daily," she says, with pure honesty. "I was using while I had a sober companion, and I went through about 20 different sober companions. I would sneak out and get drugs, I would fake my drug tests with other people's pee."

It was a mixture of cocaine and Xanax, an anti-anxiety benzodiazepine, that worried Lovato the most. "There was one night when I used a bunch of coke and popped a few Xanax bars and I began to choke a little bit. My heart started racing and I thought to myself: "Oh my God, I might be overdosing right now." Increased heart race is associated with cocaine overdose.

She also explains that she was using drugs while she publicly touting her sobriety. Her manager notes that she once appeared on a show in New York, and was clearly "on something" while talking about being sober...it was completely exhausting, physically and emotionally...she didn't care about her career."

At 25, Demi Lovato is sober now. It took an intervention and ultimatum from her family, business partners and friends to get clean. She credits her newfound sobriety with "surrendering to the process."

You can watch the full documentary below.