Scarface revealed he began smoking cigarettes and dabbling in drug use and sales at a shockingly young age.
In a frank sit-down with Shannon Sharpe, the Houston rap icon reflected on his childhood and how he could get away with nearly anything.
He shared that he first started smoking at just 4 or 5 years old, picking half-smoked cigarettes out of ashtrays after his uncles were done. By junior high, his parents had even given him permission to smoke on campus.
“I’m at school with a smoking pass. Back in junior high school, you could smoke cigarettes at school if you had a pass,” The Diary rapper recalled. “You had to get clearance from your parents. I’m telling my age right now. I’m 54, but yeah, I was smoking for real.”
Scarface went on to say he began selling weed around age 7 or 8, swiping marijuana from his stepfather’s stash, mixing it with parsley seeds, and rolling small joints to sell for $2 apiece.
“I wasn’t selling drugs, that was weed,” he clarified. “I was like 7, 8 years old, I wasn’t just Nino Brown.”
The rapper also revealed that he first smoked crack cocaine in 1983, while still a young teen, and learned how to cook it from his uncle.
“I smoked crack for the first time in 1983 when the shit was cool,” Scarface recalled. “My uncle would come in, he have a 8-ball. I learned how to cook. He put that shit in the beaker and he’d beat it with the torch and put water in there and burn it until it turned into a long little thing […] and it fall out and I hit it one time. There it is. But I wasn’t but 11, 12 years old.”
He credited his early exposure to drugs to a lack of parental guidance at home.
“I was seeking some attention from some attention that wasn’t there, that has never been there,” he told Sharpe. “You know what I mean? And I’m going to say, I say it 1,000 times, but I wasn’t controlled. I didn’t have parents that’ll, you know, stop me […] I had no guard rails. I didn’t have no boundaries.”
Scarface has spoken before about his childhood drug use, including in his 2015 memoir Diary of a Madman.
