After spending three years in a federal penitentiary, Gucci Mane opened up to Fader, expressing the terrible things he experienced and the effect the system had on him as a person.
“Life in prison was hell,” says the 36-year-old rapper born Radric Davis. He’d been serving time on two counts of firearm possession as a felon. “It was a maximum security prison and it was a lot of violence. People were dying every week. [But] I think it helped me to get to the point I’m at now, to drive me out from the drugs. It gave me time to reflect, it made a lot of relationships that were toxic in my life just fall away.”
Before his time in prison, Gucci struggled with the effects of drug addiction. “I done had a history of violence, a history of just erratic behavior,” Gucci says now. “I had a history of drug abuse and drug addiction. All of it ties [together]. It’s just a spiral of destructive behavior.”
He allegedly pushed a woman out of a moving car, he had a court-appointed stay in a mental institution, and he went on a bizarre Twitter rant where he threw artists like Nicki Minaj and Drake under the bus with wild accusations. He later apologized for that rant, blaming it on a cough syrup addiction to which he planned to receive help in rehab. Unfortunately, he never made it there and his last infraction of bizarre behavior in which he was confrontational on the street while in possession of a loaded handgun, led to his last stay in prison. Though that stint was hell, part of his life changed for the better. He ditched the drugs for a cleaner, healthier lifestyle, and came to an important realization.
“What’s the use in having all the money if you gonna die and be unhealthy and be sick or diabetic or fat as hell?” Gucci says. “What you gonna do then? Fallin’ out, having seizures. That ain’t what I need to be, that ain’t the future I want. When I was on drugs so bad, I talked different. When I was smoking weed, a damn near pound of weed every day, I was congested. When I was drinking lean like crazy every day, I was out my mind. I was always sophisticated, but it ain’t even sophisticated now — it’s just a sober, a more conscious Gucci. And people probably ain’t used to it. It took a minute for me to get used to it. But they’re gonna have to get used to it because it’s here to stay.”
Source: complex.com
