Pete Davidson has described the extent of his drug use during the height of his addiction, saying he was taking a range of substances daily and had begun cooking ketamine himself.
The comedian and former Saturday Night Live performer told Variety that his drug use included ketamine, LSD, magic mushrooms, nitrous oxide, cannabis and pills.
“It was K. I was getting liquid and cooking it. And I would do acid and shrooms and whippets and smoke weed all day and eat pills every day,” he said.
Davidson said his tolerance became so high that he no longer felt intoxicated while taking drugs. “It got scary because I didn’t feel high. I felt high when I wasn’t doing it, so I was like, this is a huge problem,” he said.
He identified 2023 as a low point, after the release of his autobiographical series Bupkis and a year after he left SNL, losing the routine and structure associated with the programme.
Davidson said the experience of “playing yourself and constantly living in your own crap” had been traumatic, and that he used drugs to ease the pain. His mother ultimately persuaded him to seek help.
“She told me her biggest fear was waking up one day to see on the news that something bad had happened to me,” he said.
Davidson went to rehab, abandoned the second season of Bupkis and said he wanted to be taken seriously. Looking back, he acknowledged that he had contributed to the intrusion into his private life.
“I was part of the problem of what I hated the most, which was the invasiveness around my personal life. I was just lobbing it up and continuing the narrative,” he said.
He said he entered rehab when he was 30, at a time when little was happening with his career. “When I turned 30 and I was there, it was a real low point,” he said. “Nothing much was going on with my career and I was like, ‘This f***in’ sucks. I can’t do it anymore.’”
Davidson said recovery had to be a personal decision rather than something undertaken for another person or a job. He described himself as otherwise sober, saying he has “four beers a year” and has not used hard drugs for two or three years.
He said it had been about a year or more since he last used cannabis, adding that it was “weirdly” the hardest substance for him to stop using. Davidson also said having a child had made it easier to remain sober.
