Five Times Brad Pitt Talked About His Pot Problem


Brad Pitt’s divorce bombshell may be big news, but some of the reasons behind his headline-making split from Angelina Jolie may not be all that surprising. TMZ reports that Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt citing irreconcilable differences, and she is also asking for complete physical custody of the couple’s six children. Jolie has requested that the judge only gives Pitt visitation rights and not physical custody.

Sources tell TMZ that Angelina became “fed up” with Brad’s longtime use of marijuana and how it was affecting their family. The celebrity gossip site alleges that Brad may have been mixing pot with alcohol and that he also has an “anger problem.” While rumors of infidelity continue to swirl, Jolie’s decision to file for divorce was reportedly based solely on Brad’s issues and Angie’s concerns over his parenting abilities.

Brad Pitt has talked about his problems with pot in the past, but he made it seem as though he had kicked the habit a long time ago.

In a 2012 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Pitt opened up about dealing with depression, and his heavy marijuana use during his 1990s movie heyday.

“I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s,” Pitt told THR.

“I was hiding out from the celebrity thing. I was smoking way too much dope; I was sitting on the couch and just turning into a doughnut, and I really got irritated with myself. I got to: ‘What’s the point? I know better than this’… I was doing the same thing every night and numbing myself to sleep — the same routine: Couldn’t wait to get home and hide out. But that feeling of unease was growing and one night I just said, ‘This is a waste.'”

Pitt said a trip to Casablanca, Morocco, in the late 1990s changed his tune when he witnessed firsthand “poverty to an extreme,” and he decided to put the kibosh on the pot.

“I saw just what I felt was so unnecessary, that people should have to survive in these circumstances — and the children were inflicted with a lot of deformities, and things that could have been avoided had become their sentence. It stuck with me,” Pitt said.

“I just quit. I stopped grass then — I mean, pretty much — and decided to get off the couch.”

In 2013, Pitt admitted to Esquire that he wasted years of his life loafing around and smoking pot.

“I spent years f***ing off,” Pitt told the magazine. “But then I got burnt out and felt that I was wasting my opportunity. It was a conscious change. This was about a decade ago.”

Pitt said he had an “epiphany” that inspired him to stop squandering his opportunities and “get up.”

“For a long time I thought I did too much damage – drug damage,” Brad revealed. “I was a bit of a drifter. A guy who felt he grew up in something of a vacuum and wanted to see things, wanted to be inspired. I followed that other thing.”

Interestingly, Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston from 2000 to 2005, well within the 10-year range he referred to in the interview. When some critics accused Brad of throwing his ex-wife under the bus, he issued a statement to E! Online explaining that his comments were misinterpreted, and she was not to blame for his boring lifestyle during their marriage, but his penchant for pot was the cause.

“Jen is an incredibly giving, loving, and hilarious woman who remains my friend,” Pitt explained. “It is an important relationship I value greatly…The point I was trying to make is not that Jen was dull, but that I was becoming dull to myself — and that, I am responsible for.”

Still, Brad made a similar comment two years prior, when talking to Parade about his past pot use. In that interview, Brad said he spent the 1990s “trying to hide out” to avoid what he called the “celebrity cacophony.”

“It wigged me out a bit,” Pitt admitted of the fame game.

“I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was so intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn’t living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage [to Aniston] had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn’t.”

With so much admitted pot smoking experience under his belt, it’s not all that surprising that Pitt once told Rolling Stone that he actually requested that his character, Floyd, in the movie True Romance be turned into a stoner.

“For that one, I did a lot of studying,” Brad told the music magazine.

“Ev­eryone’s met a Floyd. Or been a Floyd. It’s either the roommate you were trying to get rid of, or you were that roommate… I called up [director] Tony Scott a couple of days before, because I couldn’t figure out why the character talked so much and gave everyone up. I said, ‘Can he never get off the couch?’ ‘OK.’ ‘Can he be a stoner?’ ‘ Yeah.’ And that was it.”

Pitt said he did not come up with the idea for the character when he was high, though.

Of course not! It was in acting class, doing a character breakdown. Tony’s the one who came up with the honey-bear bong. That was a great touch – not mine. They are creative, though, stoners. But only when it comes to smoking – one pur­pose.”

In a 2012 interview with the Huffington Post, Pitt proclaimed that the only way to end the war on drugs is to “take the profit out of it.” Brad admitted that drug legalization would come with “a whole other host of problems,” but that he still believed the war on drugs is a farce.

While introducing director Eugene Jarecki’s drug-themed documentary “The House I Live In,” Pitt explained that drugs are already easily accessible to anyone who wants to find them.

“My drug days are long since passed but it’s certainly true that I could probably land in any city in any state and get you whatever you wanted,” Pitt said. “I could find anything you were looking for. Give me 24 hours or so.”

In the same interview, Brad said drug usage should be looked upon as a “sickness” and not a criminal activity.

“People do drugs to escape,” Pitt said. “We’re not talking about experimentation. People with long-term drug use are escaping.”

[Featured Image by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images]

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