Demi Lovato Details Hard Drug ‘Shopping Spree’ She Survived Ahead of Overdose

Demi Lovato is opening up about her heavy drug use in the days leading up to her July 2018 overdose in her new four-part documentary, Dancing With the Devil, premiering on YouTube for the public on March 23. The “Sober” singer recounts in the documentary that about a month after celebrating six years sober, she began to question her sobriety, going on a drug “shopping spree” for substances she had never used before.

“I’m surprised that I didn’t OD that night,” she said, adding later that she “went to town” when she ran into her former drug dealer at a party. “That night, I did drugs that I had never done before,” the singer said. “I had never done meth before, I tried meth. I mixed it with Molly, with coke, weed, alcohol, OxyContin. That alone should have killed me.”

At that point, the “floodgates were open,” Lovato detailed, when she began using crack and heroin, keeping her hard drug abuse a secret from her friends and family. “None of my friends know what I was using. I kept it hidden from everyone,” the Camp Rock star explained. “That was one thing I was very good at — hiding the fact that I was addicted to crack and heroin.”

Becoming dependent on smoking heroin, Lovato said she was “heavily using” when she returned to Los Angeles following the European leg of her world tour. On July 24, 2018, she overdosed on heroin laced with fentanyl, suffering three strokes, a heart attack and multiple-organ failure. Lovato also developed pneumonia due to being asphyxiated when she overdosed before her assistant found her and was able to call for help.

Lovato also opened up about being sexually assaulted the night of her overdose, something she had never felt comfortable disclosing publicly until now. “I didn’t just overdose, I also was taken advantage of,” she said. “I’ve had my fair share of sexual trauma throughout teenage, child years. When they found me, I was naked, I was blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me, and when I woke up in the hospital, they asked if I had consensual sex. There was one flash that I had of him on top of me. I saw that flash, and I said yes. It actually wasn’t until maybe a month after my overdose that I realized, ‘Hey, you weren’t in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.’” Dancing With the Devil premieres on YouTube March 23.