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Chicago-bred rapper G Herbo has come a long way, not only in terms of his success in Hip-Hop, but also when it comes to his health and happiness.

It wasn’t that long ago that the 24-year-old was struggling with drugs and an addiction to Percocet and lean. He had witnessed his first murder when he was eight and was shot at 16. He felt after a while that his was a normal upbringing, and instead of going to therapy about it all, for years, he would deal with everything by taking drugs.

“I was an addict. I have an addictive personality. I used to drink a lot of lean, I used to pop a lot of pills depending on how I felt at the moment, so I knew, the same way I was in the streets and I knew I could die in the streets, I could die from drug abuse and addiction every day I did it,” he said during a recent interview with The Breakfast Club. He would eventually start going to therapy and checked himself in twice to a detox treatment center. “Of course, I don’t want to die, [and I thought] ‘That ain’t gon’ be me,’ but I knew I could. So I moved accordingly, and it was really my son. My son was the reason I went.”

But others haven’t been so lucky. In December, Juice Wrld, another popular Chicago rapper that G Herbo knew well, died from an overdose of painkillers. G Herbo admitted there were times where things got scary for him, too. During those moments, he said girlfriend Taina Williams would be by his side and stay by it.

“I ain’t gon lie. It’s been times where I used to wake up in the middle of my sleep, couldn’t breathe, stuff like that. I never really told people,” he said. “My girl seen it before. I couldn’t breathe in the middle of the night, stuff like that. Sweats…so you know it’s real. I was going through something where I lost one of my best friends in 2018, and I started back getting real high. I swear I was getting so high, bro, I was literally in the crib and I was falling asleep as I was going down the stairs in the house.”

Williams, on the other hand, doesn’t touch drugs, so it wasn’t easy for her to watch him struggle.

“She don’t do nothin’. She hated it, she hated every minute of it. But again, we from two different worlds,” he said. “I had to tell her, this is where I came from. I literally been doing this stuff since I was 15 years old. I’ve been addicted to lean, Xanax, pills, since I was 15 years old.”

Nevertheless, she supported him as he tried to get himself together, and didn’t tell her mother, Emily B, or stepfather, rapper Fabolous, that G Herbo was on drugs so that he could get a fair shot with them.

“She didn’t [say anything]. She’s real family oriented, so she’s close with her mom and dad. She’s close with her grandparents, but yeah, she didn’t like it all. She didn’t want them to judge me because she knew what type of person I was, but it’s hard to explain that to [somebody else],” he said.

Thankfully, now he’s clean and deals with his pain and stress in a healthier way, though Williams is still a big part of it.

“I just lean towards it. I ain’t gon lie,” he said. “I always got somebody to vent to, that’s why my girl feel like she get the crazy in me because you’ve got to vent to somebody. When you come home you want that serenity, that peace, so you’ve got to let it all out. She feel like she might get it the most or the worst because it’s like, I don’t show my emotion to the world, I only show my emotion to people I care about. She handle it well, I ain’t gon lie.”

G Herbo says he is looking to help other young men like him in Chicago, and has no intentions of turning to drugs again.

“I’d be a fool if I went back to doing the same thing I was doing,” he said.

Interesting enough, back in February, fellow rapper Fabolous said that he always tried to give G Herbo a chance when he started dating his stepdaughter, because he was aware of the way people view rappers.

“Of course I was watchful, but I tried not to be judgmental ’cause I know how we’re judged,” he said on T.I.’s podcast ExpediTIously. “I know from just walking in a room and you having the title of a rapper, automatically, the bad boy, you doing wrong, infidelity. And that’s not to say those titles — every stereotype comes from experience. It don’t come out of nowhere, so I do understand it. But at the same time, let me not judge him until I know him. That’s what I wanted to do with him.”

G Herbo and Taina Williams have been together since late 2018, early 2019. He shares a son with ex-girlfriend and Instagram personality Ariana Fletcher.