Actress Helen Mirren used to love snorting cocaine at parties - until she realized she was funding evil criminals.

The Queen star admits she used to partake in recreational drug use at parties in the 1970 and 1980s. And the Oscar-winner only quit the addictive narcotic after realizing notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was holed up in South America living off the proceeds of selling the drug to other countries.

She tells Britain's GQ magazine, "(I used to do) a bit of cocaine. I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties. But what ended it for me was when they caught Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, in the early eighties .He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron."

The 63-year-old adds, "And I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this f**king horrible man in South America. And from that day I never touched cocaine again. Until that moment I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain."

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(This news article provided by World Entertainment News Network)