When Brad Pitt Confessed to Smoking Way Too Much 'Dope' in the 90s: “I Got Really Sick of Myself"

With his successful acting and producing career, Brad Pitt has amassed an impressive $400 million in net worth. But over the past few years, he has been mired in a contentious divorce from Angelina Jolie, which points to his troubled past. Pitt has been transparent about his battles with alcoholism and marijuana addiction, in a 2012 exclusive with The Hollywood Reporter, the World War Z actor revealed that his personal life was spiraling due to weed addiction, “I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s: 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,” he said. “I got to: ‘What’s the point? I know better than this.’ ” 

According to TMZ, the addiction famously cost him his marriage and separation from his kids, Jolie filed for divorce in 2016 because she "became "fed up" with Brad's consumption of weed and possibly alcohol, and mixed with what she believes is "an anger problem" and felt it became dangerous for the children," a source said back then. According to Vulture, in 2009 Pitt joked about his weed addiction while appearing on Real Time With Bill Maher.

The veteran comedian recalled the time when the Troy actor enjoyed a party rolling marijuana on the floor. “You rolled these perfect joints,” Maher said. “The most perfect joint I have ever seen. Like a machine. It was better than a cigarette.” Pitt responded in fun, “I’m an artist.” Still, he swears he gave up marijuana when he had kids: “I’m a dad now. You want to be alert.” 

In a 2013 exclusive with Esquire, Pitt said that his marijuana use kept him from completing his journalism degree. The Oceans Eleven star mentioned that his smoking habit caused him to infamously leave the University of Missouri in his last semester, two credits short of graduating. “All I had to do was write a paper,” he said. “What kind of guy is that? That guy scares me—the guy who always leaves a little on his plate. For a long time, I thought I did too much damage—drug damage.” 

After an enlightening vacation to Morocco, he later admitted that he had an instant change of heart and stopped consuming marijuana. "A trip to Casablanca, Morocco, in the mid-to-late 1990s, “where I saw poverty to an extreme I had never witnessed before, and we talked about inequality and health care, and 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.” Almost overnight, he decided something had to give. “I just quit. I stopped grass then — I mean, pretty much — and decided to get off the couch.”