According to Christina Huffington (daughter of Arianna), her struggle with cocaine addiction wasn't about doing lines at 3 a.m. surrounded by fabulous party guests. In her words, it was "absolutely unglamourous."
"It was very much me by myself in my apartment using drugs all day from morning to night," she told Savannah Guthrie in an appearance on the "Today" show on Aug. 7. "There was nothing fun about it ... I was really depressed, I was scared, I was anxious and I sort of just felt isolated and alone."
Huffington was just 16 years old when she first tried cocaine and 22 when she finally sought help and got sober. After sharing her inspiring story in a blog on The Huffington Post in April, she opened up about her road to recovery in the September issue of Glamour magazine.
"What I want to show is that addiction can strike no matter what," she said on "Today." "You can come from a loving family, you can have financial resources and you can still feel that pit of loneliness and emptiness and that desire to fill it with substances. So I just wanted to give a different face to the disease."
Of course, Christina Huffington's struggle with substance abuse not only affected her, but her family. Arianna Huffington spoke with Guthrie about how her daughter's addiction ultimately brought their family together.
"When Christina started to go public ... we rallied as a family," she said. "There are millions of young people in their teens and 20s struggling with alcohol and drug addiction. And if Christina's story can prevent one parent watching now from getting the call I got, 'Mommy, I can't breathe,' and help one young woman or young man reach out for help and know that you can turn your life around, then it will all have been worth it."
Christina Huffington summed up her decision to go public with her story in a Q&A with Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive: "I’ve found that the more I talk about my struggles with drugs, with food and with anxiety, the less painful these struggles become," she said.