“I said, ‘Jada, I think we’ve got a problem here,’” she told Contact Music. “From that day on, I went cold turkey.” The actor and singer has now been sober for eight years. It’s important to note that most people won’t find recovery going “cold turkey.” It’s OK, and normal, to experience setbacks along the way, and to accept help on your journey. This Pretty Little Liars star gave up drinking after realizing that it just wasn’t true to her personality.

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“The instinct to get out the way when you hear a popping sound, that’s real for me,” Lamar told The Guardian, attributing it to the neighborhood he was raised in. He went on to reveal, “99% of my music is specific events.” The rapper experienced depression throughout his teen years, but he’d felt it come back and was able to express the raw emotions of what he was going through on the track. However, Lamar told HipHopDX back in 2011 that his dad had an incredible impact on the his life and it kept the rapper from falling into the lifestyle. Fresh from his Grammy wins, the “Poetic Justice” rapper sat down for Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show press conference marijuana addiction in February 2025. The reasons for choosing sobriety are personal, and it’s OK if your reasons are different from those of your friends, or anyone on this list. If you’re ready to choose recovery, it’s also important to accept help, especially if you struggle with a substance that may lead to dangerous withdrawal symptoms.

• Keaton was just 23 years old when he was tragically shot in a drive-by shooting in July 2013, and though he initially survived, he succumbed a month later to his injuries.
• This is a list of rappers who are sober and recovering from former addictions.

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Kendrick was a solid student who earned good grades and put his all into creative writing. Finally, he had an avenue to unpack his feelings—and Inge would play a major role in his intellectual growth. Kendrick had to work hard to perfect his craft, and Inge wasn’t easy on him. When Kendrick submitted his work, Inge would often send it back with visible prompts for the budding poet to dig deeper.

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When asked about the song’s authenticity, 50 replied, “I don’t drink and I don’t use drugs, and I didn’t back then, either. It turns out that there are quite a lot of rappers who don’t touch drugs or alcohol. Many other sober celebrities, including Pharrell Williams and Eminem, also fit the cateogry. Kendrick Lamar credits a childhood impacted by substance abuse for his choice to live sober. The Grammy award-winner doesn’t drink or do drugs, and he’s a vocal advocate for clean living.

After becoming sober, Eminem reemerged with Recovery, his incredibly successful seventh album chronicling his journey to sobriety. It was a deeply personal album that separated him from his Slim Shady alter ego. On the hit single “Not Afraid,” Eminem raps, “It was my decision to get clean, I did it for me.” The hip hop icon celebrated his 15th year of sobriety earlier this year. He has since helped his fellow rappers with their addictions. Hip hop culture heavily promotes alcohol and drugs, from club tracks that endorse “popping bottles” to street anthems that glorify “sipping lean.” Some rappers have been vulnerable, exposing the dark side of drug use in their music.

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I know it doesn’t matter either way in the sense of appreciating his music, but I find it funny that I’ve heard him say both. “We’re excited to collaborate with Kendrick, Roc Nation, and Apple Music to deliver another unforgettable Halftime Show,” said Dudowsky. “Rap music is still the most impactful genre to date. And I’ll be there to remind the world why. They got the right one,” Lamar said in a September 2024 press release announcing the performance. Founded in 2010, Thought Catalog is owned and operated by The Thought & Expression Company, Inc. For over a decade, we’ve been at the bleeding edge of media, pioneering an infrastructure for creatives to flourish both artistically and financially. Upon entering rehab, I believed treatment to be a cult.

Even as the black church became the primary site for progressive political leadership in the late-19th and 20th centuries, we found ourselves othered and outcasted within the scope of our own theological worldview. More than anything, it highlights the absence of a westernized framework, or cosmology, to center the black experience. So we learned to adopt and adapt, taking kendrick lamar drugs old models and reclaiming them as our own. The Old Testament is packed with stories of God’s chosen people cyclically falling out of favor with the Lord, only to be defeated by their enemies, thrown into slavery and forced to worship foreign gods as divine retribution.

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He’ll never depart from the game, because it is within the game that he sees a kind of code, a type of honor to which one must adhere. To me, his comments seemed to apply not just to hustling but to broader aspects of worldly success. Once you’ve fulfilled every desire, or once you’ve surpassed certain levels of dreaming, you have to find something else to show up for. You didn’t have money, and now it comes in so fast that you can’t spend it.

Famously, he won a Pulitzer Prize for the album “DAMN.,” from 2017, a sort of expansion upon “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City,” from 2012. Both were records of rich storytelling, detailing what it was like for a young Black person to harden himself in opposition to his circumstances while still maintaining a love for his place and the people in it. Morale and the Big Steppers,” from 2022, earned the most nominations of any album by a male artist at the Grammy Awards, including a nod for Album of the Year. The record was praised for its intimacy and its thematic tenderness, with Lamar exploring his personal journey with therapy, his struggles with generational trauma, and the ways that trauma might be transferrable to his children. When Kendrick Lamar was 5, he saw a teenage drug dealer gunned down in front of his apartment building.