'Clueless' star Stacey Dash says she took '18 to 20 pills a day' during drug addiction

• Stacey Dash said she used to take "18 to 20 pills a day" during a decade-long drug addiction.
• She said she stopped after she "almost died" from a kidney infection.

Stacey Dash revealed that she had a decade-long pill addiction on "The Dr. Oz Show" on Thursday, noting that at one point, she was taking "18 to 20 pills a day."

"How bad did this addiction get?" host Dr. Mehmet Oz asked Dash in a preview clip shared to Facebook.

"I was taking 18 to 20 pills a day," the "Clueless" star responded.

When Oz pointed out that taking "18 to 20 Vicodin pills a day" is "expensive," Dash nodded in agreement and said, "I lost everything."

According to E! News, Dash told Oz that she estimates she was spending between $5,000 and $10,000 a month on pills. She ultimately stopped taking the painkillers, she said, when she "almost died" from a kidney infection.

"My kidneys were so infected that my blood was septic, and my organs were shutting down," she said about the incident. "So, I got rushed to the hospital and I had to have a full blood transfusion and I was in there for three weeks. And by the grace and mercy of God, I lived."

However, after she was discharged from the hospital, Dash said she kept using drugs.

She added: "That again was when I thought, 'OK, Stacey, then give up. You can't do this life.'"

Dash said she then called her sister and her attorney for help. Soon afterward, the actress went to rehabilitation for her drug addiction.

Dash also revealed that her parents did drugs and her mom gave her cocaine as teen

During the same chat with Oz, Dash revealed that her parents also used drugs when she was growing up and her mother gave Dash cocaine as a teenager.

"I was a very angry, angry teenager," she told the daytime talk show host. "I became angry at I'd say around the age of 10 or 11, which is when my mother finally left my father."

Dash revealed that she's now five years sober.

"In these five years, my greatest blessing is that not only have I been able to be honest with myself and become a better person," Dash said. "I've been able to understand my parents. And that they did love me and they were doing the best they could. They were just sick."

In addition to opening up about her addiction and her parents, Dash also revealed on the show that she had been sexually abused as a little girl, but she "didn't remember" until years later when she tried to attempt suicide at 17.

In a Facebook post shared on Wednesday, Dash called her pill addiction her "deepest, darkest secret."

"I thank the Lord for being able to say that I have grown more over the last 5 years than I have in my entire life," Dash wrote.

While Dash is best known for playing Dionne Davenport in the 1995 film "Clueless," she has attracted negative attention since at least 2015 for making disparaging comments about trans people, feminism, and former president Barack Obama.

In 2018, Dash unsuccessfully ran for Congress in California and was a vocal supporter of former president Donald Trump before ultimately rescinding her support for the politician after the January 6 Capitol Riots.

On "Dr. Oz," Dash addressed making controversial statements in the past, saying: "I'm not homophobic. I'm not racist. I was just angry and it benefited me."