Amber Portwood got extremely candid during a recently episode of the “Dopey”Opens a New Window. podcast, when she opened up about her past drug addiction. Not only does she recall once getting “kicked out of Walmart,” but she claims there are also pictures of her “beating up a girl in iHop.” Yikes! “I have really horrible anger problems because I’m bipolar and borderline, which is not an excuse, but at the time I didn’t know it, so I wasn’t really taking care of myself or really understanding why I was feeling certain emotions,” the 28-year-old Teen Mom OG star revealed. “I’d go party every other day. I’d be a Wednesday, I’m at the f***ing bar and whopping ass and s***, just like getting kicked out of bars or I got kicked out of our Walmart.”
“There’s like pictures of me beating up a girl in iHop,” Amber, who’s now a mom of two, continued. “It was just crazy. I don’t know where the hell I was. I was gone. You can blame the drugs for the most part for kind of being impulsive, but it was kind of just me as a person.” Amber first appeared on MTV’s 16 & Pregnant in 2009 before joining its spinoff, Teen Mom (now known as Teen Mom OG). She has starred in the franchise for almost 10 years now, so she has definitely made a lot of money in that time. And while Amber says “the money didn’t help” her issues with drugs, she doesn’t blame MTV.
“When you’re making a lot of money, there’s more drugs,” Amber explained. “Every time a drug dealer had a new stash, of whatever, they called me first because they knew I’d buy the whole [stash], because I had the money to do it. It’s never helps. I was a horrible opiate addict. I would probably do 10 to 20 hydros — if they didn’t have hydros it would be oxycontin or oxycodone … any kind of opiate that they had, I would try to take. I think it was that feeling of just kind of not being aware that I liked .. I think back in the day I was probably depressed and s***. That was my ‘go-to’ thing.”
In case you’re unfamiliar with Amber’s situation, she was arrested in December 2011 for violating probation after pleading guilty to two counts of domestic battery. One of those instances, during which she attacked ex-fiance Gary Shirley, was caught on camera and aired during an episode of Teen Mom. In June 2012, she quit her court-ordered rehab program and chose to serve a five-year prison sentence instead. After serving 17 months behind bars, she was released in November 2013. “Nothing else was working. I had overdosed at my grandma’s house on fentanyl in the bathroom,” she said, explaining why she made the decision to go to jail. “It was daylight when I was awake … I woke up on the floor, like, just drooling out of my mouth. It was nighttime, I had no clue how long I had been in there.”
While this all sounds heartbreaking, we’re happy to report that Amber is now doing well and she welcomed son James with her boyfriend Andrew Glennon in May. She also shares 9-year-old daughter Leah with Gary. Amber claims she can now “drink a little” because she “never had a problem with drinking.”