Last night (April 29), Young Thug, SAINt JHN and Rich the Kid joined Offset for his virtual concert on Facebook Live and Oculus Venues to benefit the Atlanta Community Food Bank. During the live-streamed event, Thugger revealed he’d suffered a serious health scare that almost killed him.
“So, I kinda just stayed in the bed and I was like, ‘Yo call the ambulance. I can’t move my body.’ Then later, when the ambulance came, I couldn’t get out of the bed,” the So Much Fun rapper remembered. “They had to get me out of the bed, basically. I felt like my whole body was numb and I couldn’t move. I went to the hospital and I had found out that I had liver and kidney failure. And I kinda had sorta passed away, like, I kinda died.”
“I was in the hospital for like 17 days. I left the hospital, my mom didn’t trust it,” he continued. “So, I left the hospital, went to another hospital, they was like, ‘Man, you got liver and kidney failure. You supposed to be dead. Basically, you’ve been dead.’ I’ve been killed before.”
The reflection was a lead-up to “Killed Before,” a track off Thugger and Future’s 2017 mixtape, Super Slimey. After performing the track, Thug issued a final warning about his health scare.
“Drugs aren’t good, don’t do drugs,” he told his virtual audience.
Thug has previously referenced his own consumption of lean on social media and in his music. According to Medical News Today, both promethazine and codeine — either of which is found in lean — can cause potentially fatal liver and kidney damage. In 2017, the late Fredo Santana was hospitalized for kidney and liver failure, which he revealed to be a result of his heavy lean usage. Several other artists, including the late Juice WRLD, Lil Pump, Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne and more have expressed their struggles with addiction to lean or suffered health side effects because of the substance.