Jada Pinkett Smith Opens Up About Selling Drugs as a Teen & Why She Did It | Jada Pinkett Smith | Just Jared: Celebrity News and Gossip

Jada Pinkett Smith is opening up about her life.

The 52-year-old star got candid in her new memoir Worthy, detailing her marriage to Will Smith, her mental health struggle, and her upbringing.

She also spoke about leading a double life as a performer at school, and a drug dealer in the streets.

“When you aren’t the priority of your parents, you don’t know how to be a priority to yourself. I had parents who were addicted to drugs,” she said to People.

Keep reading to find out more…

Jada was raised between different homes, sometimes with her maternal grandmother, and sometimes with her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, a heroin addict who would get sober and eventually become a mainstay in her life. Her father, who would at times be violent, would come in and out of her life. (Robsol Pinkett Jr. died in 2010.)

“Not having a healthy foundation, as I would come to find out way into my adulthood, had some really strong effects in regard to how I saw myself,” she explains.

“I knew that anything that I needed was something I needed to provide for,” Jada explained. “I decided to sell drugs.”

“Growing up, the drug dealers were the ones that had affluence. That’s what we readily saw as success. And so for me, considering my circumstances at the time, my mother was not doing well. She was a high-functioning heroin addict. We didn’t have the things that we should have. The home we lived in was not taken care of.”

She also worked several jobs, “legit jobs,” beginning at 12, including working at The Gap and as a telemarketer. “Having money in my pocket was a must…I just wanted financial freedom,” she says.

“What if something happens to my mother? What if she doesn’t come home one night? Either overdosed, arrested, whatever. And so, I decided to sell drugs. I decided to sell crack cocaine,” she continued to explain.

Because of the drug epidemic in Baltimore in the 1980s, she explained: “Drugs were going to touch you, period. You could use them, you could sell them, but there was no being in an environment like that and drugs not touch you. And I’m not saying that it’s right, of course, now being in a whole different mindset. But when you’re living in a war zone and you just thinking about survival, I wasn’t trying to use drugs. I surely wasn’t going to be a drug dealer’s girlfriend. But I wanted money so that I could be independent. I wanted to take care of myself.”

“I thought I was going to be a queen pin, for sure. You can get caught up in the scenery. I was rollin’ with some really high rollers at the time. That’s a whole ‘nother Jada, a whole ‘nother Jada that would chase somebody down the alley with a switchblade because they stole $700. Or the Jada that would sell crack cocaine and then get set up and two dudes come in with nine-millimeters and she gets a gun put to her head.”

Find out what the biggest revelations are in her book about her marriage to Will Smith.