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Todd Bridges, the man who played Willis Jackson on Diff'rent Strokes, offered his own insight into the trials of being a childhood star this week, sharing his story of drug addiction in various interviews.

As an actor of a hit show, the young Bridges was pulling in $30,000 a week. But by age 22 he was out of work.

Bridges said he began selling drugs to pay down his $300,000 debt, but eventually started getting high off his own supply. Specifically, he battled addictions to crystal meth and cocaine.

"I hated myself," said Bridges, now 44, on Access Hollywood. "I hated the way I looked in the mirror. I believed everything people said about me."

Bridges recently penned a tell-all autobiography that details many of these stories, as well as the traumatic tale of alleged sexual abuse by a male publicist, who, Bridges said, also introduced him to drugs. His father, he said, took his publicist's side.

The book, "Killing Willis: From Diff'rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted," is particularly timely in light of the recent death of another childhood star, Corey Haim, whom Bridges knew.

During an interview with the Today Show, he said he reached out to Haim in 2009 in an effort to get him to stop taking drugs, but to no avail.

"The thing about drug addiction is, sometimes people are ready to stop and sometimes they're not," he said. "You have to have it in your mind that you're ready to stop."

He also said that one problem with drugs is that addicts typically don't think they have a problem.

"No one ever goes into addiction thinking they are going to get addicted to drugs," he said. "You do it to cover the pain up."

On a Fox News interview, Bridges said he does not blame Hollywood. (Click here to watch the video.)

"We can't blame Hollywood, it's not Hollywood -- those are choices that I made," he said. "The media always wants to blame Hollywood: 'Oh, it's because they threw you away,' and all this and that, but I can't blame Hollywood. ... I made some stupid choices; I made some horrible mistakes that cost me."