Lady Gaga has never dabbled with drugs since finding fame because she got the wild party era out of her system when she was a lonely teen.
The Born This Way hitmaker insists she never became addicted and gave up popping pills when she started singing professionally.
“There was a buffet of options (of drugs),” she tells the Los Angeles Times. “It’s very lonely being a performer. There’s a certain loneliness that I feel, anyway – that I’m the only one that does what I do. So it feels like no one understands. And the urge to use is because you’re searching for a way to quell the pain.”
“When I first started to perform around the country, doing nightclubs, there was stuff everywhere, but I had already partied when I was younger so I didn’t dabble,” she continues. “I was able to avoid it because I did it when I was a kid.”
Gaga, who drew on her knowledge of drug use to play aspiring singer Ally in A Star is Born, opposite director and actor Bradley Cooper’s washed-up singer character, insists the drugs only temporarily squashed her feelings of insecurity and loneliness, and now when she’s on a downer she looks to her fans.
“To be honest, I think what makes me feel beautiful is when I see happiness in my fans,” she says. “When I see or hear from them that the music that I’ve made has changed their life in some way, that’s what makes me feel beautiful.
“At the end of the day, I could be in a million movies and put out a million songs and everyone could say, ‘She was so beautiful’, but that’s not really what I want. I want them to say, ‘I saw that movie and I cried my eyes out and I learned something about myself’.”