On Los Angeles rapper ScHoolboy Q’s upcoming album, Oxymoron, the TDE artists’ past drug use is one of a variety of topics addressed on the LP. While speaking with Angie Martinez of Hot 97, Q further discussed his drug use, which he says consisted of using Percocet, Xanax, and lean.
According to the West Coast lyricist, he never experimented with OxyContin or the other drugs he sold as a former drug dealer, but did find himself using lean heavily. As a result of his lean use, Q recalled having severe stomach pains to the point where he could barely move during South By Southwest one year.
“I was never addicted to like OxyContin, stuff I was selling,” he said. “I was addicted to like Percocet and like xanies…One of your homies give you a pill. You say you can’t go to sleep. You go to sleep off of it. You think it’s amazing. You do it again and then the next thing you know it don’t put you to sleep no more. It’s like being super high. Like super off the trees. You know? So, you just keep doing it and then the next thing you know your body starts needing it. You’ll have like bad, bad stomach pains. Like same thing with the lean. It just gives you so much stomach pain. Like it’s crazy. You have to like—Man, I’ll never forget the time we was at South By Southwest and I had to do all these shows and I could not move…I was on the couch just curled up until I had to do the show. You know what I mean? Hours of your stomach just feeling like it’s tight like you working out.”
ScHoolboy Q later revealed that at one point he did stop using lean and with it all the other drugs he was using, but ultimately relapsed and began using lean again “from time to time.”
“One day I couldn’t buy no more lean. Lean was like the first part of it,” Q said. “I still sip lean from time to time now though. I stopped and then I kinda like relapsed, but not like how I used to do. Like the pills, now that’s just for flights. One day I just stopped sipping lean and then all the other stuff went with it. The valium and the Percocets and xanies and stuff like that. I never got into like the narcos and stuff like that, but I pretty much did with valium and Percocets.”
Although lean was cited as a factor in the death of Port Arthur, Texas rapper Pimp C, a coroner’s reported obtained by the Los Angeles Times states that his death was “due to promethazine/codeine effects and other unestablished factors,” Q says that exhaustion is more of a factor when it concerns artists’ health.
The rapper then went on to defend lean when the subject of lean and seizures was brought up by Martinez.
“Man, that shit ain’t from no lean, man,” he said. “It’s not. We are rappers, we don’t sleep. People don’t understand like we don’t—I just came from L.A. just now. And I just got to L.A. from New Orleans. I had to do a show, turn up, take a shower. You know what I’m saying? Go straight to the airport and gotta sit next to some fat lady.”
ScHoolboy Q’s interview with Angie Martinez comes less than one week before the scheduled February 25 release of Oxymoron. During his conversation with the Hot 97 host, Q also discussed his collaborations with 50 Cent, Diddy’s business practices, and more.
