Gypsy Rose Blanchard Reveals Prison Drug Use, Opioid Addiction Before Mom's Murder

Before she was released from prison for her role in mom Dee Dee's murder back in 2015, the alleged victim of Munchausen by proxy  -- now known as Factitious disorder imposed on another -- opened up in a series of new interviews for Lifetime's The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.

In the doc, Blanchard claims that after running out of the prescribed pain medication doctors put her on following one of her surgeries, she began stealing Vicodin from her mother.

"I was still in pain ... I would just go take one or two from her bottle," she said. "I didn't know what addiction really was. I just knew it was a craving, it's all I could think about. I wanted another one."

"I never told anyone about this before. I first started taking pain pills after I had extensive surgery done. I was 16 years old, but the craving for the pain pills continued," she explained. "It was like an escape from my reality. As my tolerance started to heighten, one or two didn't get me high anymore, so I took 3 or 4."

Blanchard said her mother did start to suspect she was stealing her meds and confronted her over it, but Gypsy Rose lied to her.

After she was sentenced to prison time for her role in her mother's murder, Blanchard said her substance abuse continued behind bars.

"When I first got to prison, I was subjected to a lot of peer pressure and I smoked for about a year. I started with vaping and it became addictive, obviously, then I went to real cigarettes," she said, detailing how it began. "It led me down some bad choices I regret, but it was a learning experience for me because I got to see who I want to be and who I don't want to be."

"In the first couple years of my incarceration, I coped using drugs. I think I first started to learn that drugs were available in prison when I started seeing other women get high," she continued, saying she was able to get her hands on suboxone -- a medication used to treat addiction -- and it gave her "the same high as taking pain pills."

"Instantly, I was brought back to the addiction I had to pain pills back when I was living with my mother. One day, one of the women that I owed $50 to for a bunch of pills, she was pressuring me to get paid," Blanchard said, explaining she called her stepmother and lied by saying she needed money to replace another inmate's CD player which she broke.

"It had been eating at me for years that I lied to Kristy. I hated myself and I hated what I became," Blanchard recalled. "I'm clean, I'm sober and I'm not that person anymore. Nobody knows I even had an addiction before prison, let alone in prison."

She added that she still has "a lot of demons to work through."

The three-night, six-part docuseries, The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, kicks off Friday, January 5, with two installments each evening.