Scarface says that he smoked cigarettes, plus experimented with and sold drugs, at an astonishingly young age.
In a candid conversation with Shannon Sharpe, seen below, the Houston rap legend opened up about his youth and how he got away with almost anything.
Scarface said he first started smoking cigarettes when he was just 4 or 5 years old by picking them out of ashtrays after his uncles used them. He said by the time he reached junior high, he had permission from his parents to smoke on campus.
“I’m at school with a smoking pass. Back in junior high school, you can smoke cigarettes at school if you had a pass,” The Diary artist 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 also said he began selling weed when he was around 7 or 8 years old by taking marijuana from his stepfather’s stash, mixing it with parsley seeds, and rolling it into small joints to sell for $2 each.
“I wasn’t selling drugs that was weed,” he said. “I was like 7, 8 years old, I wasn’t just Nino Brown.”
The rapper also shared that he smoked crack cocaine for the first time in 1983, when he was just a teenager, and that he learned how to cook the drug from his uncle.
“I smoked crack for the first time in 1983 when the shit was cool,” Scarface said. “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.”
Scarface attributed his early exposure to drugs to a lack of supervision 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 previously spoken about using drugs in his childhood, including in his memoir Diary of a Madman, which was released in 2015.
