Christy Carlson Romano Says She Tried Cocaine for the First Time at 23: 'You Feel Cool Doing It in the Moment'

Christy Carlson Romano is opening up about the first time she tried cocaine.

The former Disney Channel star admitted that she was “old” to begin using the drug, noting that she was 23 at the time.

During the Tuesday, September 29, episode of the “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast, she revealed that it wasn’t the only vice she turned to as the spotlight from her child-star days began to fade.

“I was a binge-drinking, solve your problems by partying and going out and having fun [kind of person],” Carlson Romano shared.

Carlson Romano, who is now sober, was on several Disney shows growing up, including Even Stevens, Kim Possible and Cadet Kelly. Despite being a fixture in Disney shows and movies in the early 2000s, she explained that her drug use was due to wanting to feel seen.

“I think what I liked was the attention I got for doing it in front of people. You feel cool doing it in the moment, in the room with people,” she shared. “Everybody is like, ‘I got the Disney girl to do cocaine for the first time.'”

Disney child stars often faced pressure to maintain a certain image as they got older, but Carlson Romano said she wasn’t particularly concerned with how she was perceived for regularly going out and partying.

“I didn’t care [if people found out]. First of all, I had been clubbing for a while just trying to get noticed, and it never happened,” she recalled. “Before Instagram, you really didn’t have control over your image.”

“I’ve been clubbing since I was 16. But I’ve been really aggressively clubbing to try to get noticed since I was 21," she continued.

In her memoir, Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Rise and Fall of a Child Star, she addresses a moment with Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff amid their feud in the 2000s. Duff and Lohan were famously caught in a love triangle with Aaron Carter and were frequently pitted against each other in the media. Carlson Romano revealed that she tried to befriend Lohan during that time.

“I’ll kick myself because it’s an embarrassing story, but we all have things,” she recalled. “And that’s what I hope makes the book relatable, where it’s, ‘Foot in mouth. You were dumb, and now you’ve learned from that.'”

Carlson Romano’s memoir Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Rise and Fall of a Child Star will be available for purchase on October 6 from various retailers online and in-store.