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Marina Abramovic Helped Lady Gaga Kick Her Marijuana Habit

lady gaga, marina abramovic, weed

Lady Gaga says she developed a marijuana habit so intense that she couldn’t stop smoking until performance artist Marina Abramovic forced her to go cold turkey. In a recent interview with British magazine Attitude, the ARTPOP star reveals that she was lighting up as many as 15 times a day to cope with the pain from a hip injury she sustained earlier this year.

“I was smoking 15 joints a day,” Gaga tells Attitude (via Reuters). “It was a habit that eventually occurred when the pain got so bad with the hip… I was just numbing, numbing, numbing myself and then sleeping it off and then getting on stage, killing it in pain, then getting off and smoking, smoking, smoking, not knowing what the pain was.”

The injury was so severe that Mother Monster was forced to cancel a slew of U.S. performances booked for her Born This Way Ball tour. Eventually, after Gaga’s self-prescribed marijuana use looked to border on dependency, her friend (and sometime collaborator) Marina Abramovic helped her kick the habit.

“It wasn’t until I was with Marina and she said, ‘Okay you’re coming to my house, No television, no computer, no marijuana, no nothing, no food. For three days, art only. You eat only art,'” Gaga recalls. “I cold-turkeyed. For weeks and weeks I didn’t smoke at all. And now I smoke a little bit at night, just you know, for fun — but not to cope. That’s the difference. Marina was the only person who could get me to do that and it was not intended to be rehab.”

Wait, so, does that mean when Gaga sings “I need you more than dope,” she’s really shouting out Abramovic? Maybe that question will be answered later tonight (November 8), when SiriusXM runs a career-spanning interview with the 27-year-old singer for their Town Hall Q&A series. The broadcast will air at 9 p.m. EST via SiriusXM Hits 1, the SiriusXM Internet Radio mobile app, and the SiriusXM website.

Gaga’s long-awaited third album, ARTPOP, will be officially released on Monday, November 11, but fans can stream the entire LP through iTunes Radio right now.