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'Hills' Heidi Montag eating painkillers? 'Friends' worry for her

By April MacIntyre Apr 28, 2010, 18:24 GMT

03/17/2010 - Heidi Montag - The Hills TV show shooting - Villa Blanca - Beverly Hills © KAT / PR Photos

Heidi Montag's friends are ratting out the reality TV star to the tabloids, "fearing" she may be eating Vidcodin like Tic Tacs.

Sources on the set of "The Hills" fear that Heidi Montag is developing a dangerous addiction to painkillers -- months after her recovery from plastic surgery.

"She's a shell of her former self," a show insider tells Usmagazine.com, on stands today.

A rep for the reality star, 23, tells Us, "This is completely ridiculous."

Heidi and her husband" Spencer, have developed increasingly weird behavior. While their 2008 elopement to Mexico was done with a knowing wink, they're recently "crossed over to this bizarre place," the source says.

Case in point: Heidi only agreed to get 10 plastic surgery procedures in one day last November "because she knew it would be a huge story," an insider says.

Jason Wahler tells the magazine "I knew her when she was normal."

Yet Wahler told Monsters and Critics at a past red carpet Hills event he thought Heidi and Spencer were mental. Wahler said, “They’re mentally retarded, that’s why they have no friends.”

"They are addicted to the fame," the Us source says. "As The Hills winds down and people start to care less, they are desperate to get back that high."

Pals say they've always had a thirst for fame -- especially Spencer, who declared shortly after The Hills premiered in 2006, "I'm going to date those girls and blow that show up." (Before pursuing Heidi, he also went after Audrina Patridge.)

Says a source who knew Heidi then, "She was spellbound. If it weren't for him, she'd be a mom in the suburbs."

To find out how Heidi and Spencer blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent months, how Spencer has gotten violent and lost control with his family and how they're trying to compete against the Kardashians and Jersey Shore cast, pick up the new issue of Us Weekly, on sale now.