Wendy Williams sure can dish it out, but in her defense, she's always been open about her own skeletons: her addiction to crack cocaine back in the '90s, her ongoing battle with weight loss, her two miscarriages and her husband's infidelities.
That kind of transparency and honesty didn't stop Monday during the season 7 debut of her talk show, in which she opened up about how she realized that her 15-year-old son, Kevin, had been smoking synthetic marijuana. Williams openly admits to being the kind of mother who snoops all up and through her son's room to make sure he's not "up to things," as she routinely puts it, so she was totally blindsided when she realized what he'd been doing.
"Our son was made exposed to synthetic marijuana […] by a loved one who he looked up to," Williams said. "It's one of those pens where you don't see the smoke and you don't smell anything."
Now, weed is fairly commonplace as drugs go, but Williams explained how dangerous the drug can be in its synthetic form, since the user can never tell exactly what is in the batch.
"This synthetic marijuana, there was only, like, 2 percent THC in it. The rest was factory-manufactured mess," she said, her voice cracking as she went on to explain the effect it had on her son. His behavior changed—significantly. "He got turned out to the point where he went off the rail for a moment."
Williams was on her comedy tour this summer, but in her personal life, she was reeling from the discovery and was trying to figure out a plan with her husband to help her son.
"I'm trying to make funny on [my comedy] tour, but in actuality my heart is breaking, and my kid could've been dead," she said. She went on to talk about the treatment she got for her son. She and her husband took a nontraditional approach.
"Fortunately, Kevin has two parents who took harness of the thing. We took him out of the country for holistic treatment. We didn't want to pump him with psychiatric drugs and all that other kind of mess. I'm glad to say that our boy is on the good side of good now," she said.
Williams encouraged parents and guardians to stay on top of their teens and to talk to them about the dangers of synthetic marijuana. Kudos to her for sharing this important story and message.
Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a staff writer at The Root and the founder and executive producer of Lectures to Beats, a Web series that features video interviews with scarily insightful people. Follow Lectures to Beats on Facebook and Twitter.
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