Vince Staples Talks Lifelong Sobriety

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Vince Staples Talks Lifelong Sobriety

While the average rapper is out here xan’ed up and leaned out…Vince Staples is among the rare young artists who is completely passing on the liquor and drugs.

The Compton rapper spoke about his sobriety in a new GQ article about drug-free musicians, and revealed that he’s been sober his entire life. That’s right…he’s never popped a pill, hit a blunt, sipped on lean or even had a single drop to drink.

“It’s not something that I honestly ever think about. I just never wanted to. I’m not the kind of person that will do something that I don’t want to do.”

While it seems like something inconsequential to him — he’s just plain not interested in alcohol or drugs — he gets why it’s some grand shocking revelation to most people that take one look at him as a young Black rapper from Compton and make assumptions:

“They don’t expect this from a young black musician my age from where I come from. Like, how could you end up being in the ghetto, went through this, went through that, and not experienced drugs, not experienced alcohol?”

However, he admits that the very same things about him that would make people assume he’d partake in recreational drug use are the exact reasons he has no interest:

“When you’re surrounded with death and dismay and poverty and all these things that happen every day, I didn’t have time to worry about using or partaking in certain things. People where I come from don’t use drugs in a recreational sense. We’re not at a party, or at the rock show, or at the rap show, doing lines in the bathroom. Where I come from, life comes day after day after day, and people use these things to cope.”

He says the immediate threats of death and violence in his life superseded any interest he could have ever had in spending the day chasing a high.

“When you have to think about your next 15 minutes—you have to think about the walk to the store, you have to think about how you’re getting to school, you have to think about the bus ride home, you have to think about how you’re going to sneak a gun into the football game—the last thing I was thinking about was getting high.”

Good for him for staying true to his inclinations and not falling into the industry BS of drug consumption.

Jerod Harris/Getty Images