Love Me Or Leave Me Alone
Gunplay details his struggles with drugs.
As told to Eric Diep
Images David Walter

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of XXL Magazine.

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I started with weed and then tried coke, pills and everything else. I’m the type of brother that does drugs and don’t let the drugs do me. Coke was always there. I started coke at 16. I quit at 28. Everything I did, it made me who I am.

I might have banged my head against the wall a few times, but I had to do that shit or I wouldn’t get the picture.

I ain’t gonna say I am sober like that, like that. I just quit the cocaine. Don’t get it twisted. [But] having a sober mind, it does good for a lot of things. Like your perspective. You’re not thinking on a drug-induced emotion. You’re stable.

[When I do have urges to use cocaine], I snort the molly. I did coke [for] so long, it’s not that I got praise for the cocaine, but once I realized that I could do molly the same way I do coke? I wanted to do it like that.

With rap, [drugs] is always going to be part of my subject matter because it’s part of me. I’m not compromising my music for my fans by doing some shit that I don’t want to do just ’cause it’s going to sell good. Fuck your market. Fuck your region. Once I know I feel right, knowing my fans, they see that I am speaking truth. I’m not trying to be the next Tupac. I am just trying to be Richard Morales. Love me, or leave me alone.

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