Stephen Fry, 66, says childhood sweets like candy cigarettes were a gateway to his cocaine addiction

Stephen Fry has said that becoming addicted to sugar as a child as a result of his ‘addictive impulse’ was the gateway to an eventual cocaine addiction that he battled for more than a decade.

The beloved TV star, 66, said that after initially indulging in sweets, he eventually turned to tobacco and then Class A drugs.

While appearing as a guest on John Cleese’s GB News show, Stephen said: ‘When I was a teenager I had this huge empty hole inside me that said, ‘Feed me, I need this sugar, I need it “‘.

‘When it wasn’t sugar it became tobacco, so I smoked and when I was 20 it became cocaine. I just couldn’t sit still. It’s that addictive impulse.’

He went on to blow up the sweet treats of yesteryear, as well as his school supply store that sold coconut chips packaged as roll-your-own tobacco.

“You had a licorice pipe and you had cigarettes with a red tip on the end, they were candy cigarettes.”

Before adding: ‘So you were groomed for cocaine and tobacco. Basically you were given white powder and tobacco, and I could never eat enough of that.’

Stephen previously claimed to have used cocaine at Buckingham Palace and a range of other respected institutions.

The list included the House of Lords, the House of Commons and the BBC Television Centre.

The claims came in his autobiography, More Fool Me, published in 2014.

Fry wrote: ‘I take this opportunity to apologize unreservedly to the owners, managers or representatives of the noble and ignoble properties and to the hundreds of private homes, offices, car dashboards, tables, mantelpieces and available polished surfaces that were so could easily have been damaged. added to this list of shame.

“You may want me suspended, expelled, blackballed, or otherwise punished for past crimes; This is definitely the time to call the phone, the police or the club secretary.’

In the book, the presenter spoke in detail about the habit which cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds.

It also revealed his brushes with the law and how he narrowly escaped drug charges after being stopped by police while in possession of cocaine.

Recalling the “memorable night” in 1986 when he first used cocaine with an unnamed actor friend, he admits he never saw himself as an addict as his dependency spiraled out of control.

He wrote, “How can I explain the extraordinary waste of time and money that has gone into my fifteen years of habit?

‘Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and just as many hours of sniffing, snorting and tooting the time that could have been spent writing, performing, thinking, exercising, living.’

The actor, who suffers from bipolar disorder, also explained his simple motivation behind using cocaine: ‘I didn’t do coke because I was depressed or under pressure.

‘I didn’t take it because I was unhappy (at least I don’t think so). I brought it along because I really enjoyed it.”