A former child star who many students remember as the cute and outspoken Stephanie Tanner discussed her struggle with drugs and alcohol Tuesday night.

Jodie Sweetin, most remembered for her role on the family sitcom “Full House,” gave a lecture, “A Young Star’s Road to Recovery,” in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.

Sweetin spoke to a jam-packed audience, which caused a few minutes of delay on the speech. She talked about her addiction to drugs and alcohol, relapse and her experience in rehab.

“A lot of people think because I was a child star, of course, you’re going to end up being screwed up,” she said. “I don’t think that was the entire reason that everything turned out the way that it did.”

Sweetin starred on “Full House” for eight years, starting when she was 5 years old.

“It was a huge deal for me when at age 13, ‘Full House’ ended,” she said. “I was 13 and I lost my job and I was like, now what do I do?”

Sweetin said she started drinking at age 13.

“Once I started using, my life changed in a lot of really dramatic ways. I wasn’t as happy as I used to be,” she said. “I started drinking before school, I started drinking after school. I started using a lot.”

When she went to college, her parents started realizing something was wrong.

Her parents told her she could live at college under one condition: if she came home on the weekends so she wouldn’t party. She said it didn’t work out.

“I had gotten to the point where I didn’t care about the things I used to care about,” she said. “I didn’t care about school. I used to love school.”

Sweetin said she had a lot of problems in college. She got to a point where she started to worry about herself.

“I had a roommate who walked into my room and looked at me and said ‘I can’t let you do this anymore,'” Sweetin said. “She said, ‘If you have one more drink, I can’t live in this room with you anymore,’ and I looked at her and I took a drink.”

Sweetin had a moment of clarity in college and decided to stop drinking and using drugs.

After over two years of sobriety, Sweetin relapsed. She said she listened to that little voice in the back of her head.

“Around October 2002 I listened to that voice and I went out and I drank,” she said. “Something had started and I didn’t stop.”

At the time, Sweetin was married to a police officer who had no idea she was using methamphetamine frequently.

“Within one month of trying [meth] I was doing it everyday all day,” she said. “Physically, emotionally, I was an absolute wreck.”

After a night of using drugs, Sweetin ended up in the emergency room because of factors induced by drugs and alcohol.

She went through a rough two days of detox and decided to enter rehab in Malibu.

Sweetin did not actually have an intervention with the cast of “Full House,” as cute as it would have been, she said jokingly.

Sweetin was in rehab for six weeks, and got a divorce while she was in rehab.

“It was scary,” she said. “For the first time in my life I really had to grow up.”

Since leaving rehab in 2005, Sweetin is focusing on finding her passion.

“I had gone to college and gotten a degree, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she said.

Jonathan Yungtum, freshman in construction engineering, said he attended the lecture not because Sweetin was a former “Full House” star, but because he was interested in what she had to say.

“I think because it is Veishea week, the topic kind of has a double meaning, I think they wanted to bring the idea to people’s attention,” he said.

“Drinking definitely goes on at Iowa State, but I don’t think it is worse than any other college campus.”