Metta World Peace says he learned to cook crack at age 13
Metta World Peace's challenging upbringing in the housing projects of Queens, N.Y. is fairly well known. But the 36-year-old has kept understandably some of the specifics under wraps. But on ESPN's "Highly Questionable," the former Ron Artest filled the public in on parts of his childhood.
On Tuesday's episode, World Peace admitted that he learned how to cook crack shortly after he became a teenager.
"That was something I'm not proud of, obviously," he said. "But it was something that was introduced to me at an early age."
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World Peace also shared a drug-related anecdote from his youth, detailing a situation when, at his cousins' home, he nearly flushed a significant amount of drugs down the toilet.
"My cousins [were] cutting up the crack and everything and the police started knocking on the door," he said. "I was about to flush the drugs in the toilet and my cousin was like, 'Don't flush the drugs. That's a lot of money!'"
World Peace's rise to fame, coming from such a detrimental upbringing, really is astounding -- especially considering the progress he's made on a personal level since the infamous Malice at the Palace brawl in 2004, which includes speaking with a psychologist and advocating for mental health.
"Sometimes my sessions would run concurrent with each other. So I'd be seeing three therapists in one day," he said to Huffington Post earlier this year.
"I don't feel bad about telling somebody I see a psychologist. I don't feel that you should feel bad about improving yourself. And then if you tell people that you're trying to improve yourself, they're going to want to improve themselves and not be embarrassed about going to see a psychologist."
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