Sharna Burgess Opens up About Smoking Meth at Age 17

Sharna Burgess is opening up about her experience using hard drugs as a teenager and how her love of dance saved her from going down an even more dangerous path. The 38-year-old Dancing With the Stars pro recalled a moment of realization she experienced while smoking meth at age 17 during Wednesday’s episode of her podcast Oldish, which she hosts with Randy Spelling and fiancé Brian Austin Green.

“I was very, very uncomfortable in my reality, so I would escape to this place of euphoria,” she explained of the origins of her drug use after suffering a knee injury that took her away from the world of dance. The recently-engaged dancer added, “Eventually the things I would take to get to that place of euphoria weren’t strong enough or enough and I do more and have more and more often. And that was the slippery slope for me.”

And so at 17 years old, Burgess found herself at the tail end of “probably being awake for three days,” sitting in the backyard of someone’s house and “a crack pipe was being passed around with meth in it.” She explained, “I had been smoking meth now for a little while, not every day but on and off. At that time it was a party drug, and I was pretty much partying three to four days a week.”

Burgess continued, “I was sitting there watching this pipe passed around, and the universe – God – whoever you call it, game me this moment and I saw everyone. I saw everybody sitting opposite me with complete clarity of what my future looked like. Here I was at 17 years old, watching 20-somethings, and maybe even 30-somethings, passing around this crack pipe, just waiting to get a little bit more out of it.”

“I realized that I had come from being an Australian champion ballroom dancer. I represented my country at the World Championships,” she explained. “I was an athlete, the best in the country at the time. And because of a knee injury, I fell off. But I realized how far I’d fell and how much I needed to get back to that person, that this was not what I was meant for. And that was where it all changed for me.”

The moment helped her realize she “needed dance back in [her] life” and prompted her to move to Melbourne to escape that toxic environment. “I knew I needed to get back into [dance], and thankfully I had that to guide me through,” Burgess shared. Ultimately, the Australia native would find her way to Dancing With the Stars, where she would make her debut in Season 16. Her time on Dancing With the Stars ultimately led to her first meeting with Green in 2020, and the two would go on to welcome 14-month-old son Zane before getting engaged in July 2023.