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50 Cent was, at one point in his life, a drug dealer. But one thing he was not was a user.

He has always been cognisant of how nightmarish drug addiction can be, so, despite the fact that drugs have played a huge role in his personal story, he always steered clear of succumbing to them himself. Not only that, but he even incorporated his aversion to their ill effects into his music.

While 50 was growing up, his mother, a single parent, dealt drugs for money — and that left a strong impression on the young Curtis Jackson. “The only people I saw coming round who had nice things were from my mom’s life,” he once reflected in a 2020 conversation with The Guardian. “They had Cadillacs, expensive jewelry, everything that symbolised financial freedom.” He wanted a taste of this high life for himself.

After his mother died while he was just a boy, 50 came to realise that dealing was a way to achieve the riches he craved. “I had gotten used to a certain style of living with Mom hustling,” he told Newsweek in 2005. “I got everything I wanted. I knew my grandmother couldn’t afford to buy me Air Jordans, and I didn’t want to even bother her with that. So I started hustling to buy things. I’d tell her whatever I had new was my friend’s stuff across the street. That’s how I became two people — one was the hard-core drug dealer in the day and the other was my grandmother’s baby by night.”

50’s drug-dealing career inevitably got him into trouble, and it eventually saw him get sent to boot camp when he was 19. But, when he got out, a new career path opened up before him: music. He decided to knock dealing on the head and to instead focus on forging his rap career, which, to be fair, worked out well for the man.

Drugs were always present in 50’s early life, but, despite that — or, arguably, because of that — he never took them himself. 50 has always lived a clean life, and he even maintained his discipline as he found fame and fortune. He stayed away from taking drugs, and he doesn’t drink, either. But, just as he used to sell drugs without taking them, he seems perfectly happy to sell alcohol without drinking it.

50 Cent has his own brand of luxury champagne, and, in his book Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter, he explained how he gets away with promoting the product without ever actually having to consume it himself. “First I’ll pour drinks from a bottle of Champagne for everyone who is in VIP with me,” he wrote. “When the bottle is empty, I’ll give it to one of my guys and have him quietly refill it with ginger ale. For the rest of the night I’ll have that bottle in my hand. I’ll take swigs every now and then just to keep the vibe right, but I’m not drinking anything but Canada Dry.”

50 is, clearly, a fairly ruthless businessman, a person who is happy to flog products he himself would never consume. We can all make our judgements about that, but his self-discipline is something that can’t be denied — and, in its way, is admirable. He has lived a life surrounded by drink and drugs, but, understanding how badly they can mess up a person’s life, he always resisted their allure. And, in a way, he sort of advocates for others to do the same.

‘A Baltimore Love Thing,’ a track lifted from his second album, The Massacre, isn’t straightforwardly an anti-drug song, but scratch a bit below the surface and the message is clear. The track presents itself as a love song — “We have a love thing, you treatin’ this like it’s just a fling / What we have is more sacred than a vow or a ring” — but it’s actually a song dealing with addiction, written from the perspective of heroin itself.

In case the message proves too subtle to pick up on, 50 does depict withdrawal at one point in the song in quite an explicit way. “The fiends need me,” he raps, “I ain’t around, they bones ache / Detox, rehab, cold sweats, watch them shake / I’m not that genie in a bottle, I’m in a bag / Take one hit and slide off to the Land of H, man.”

With talk of aching bones and cold sweats, this is hardly a romantic depiction of drug use. So even though the music is almost tender, he clearly stands against taking heroin. His comfort with dealing drugs and promoting alcohol notwithstanding, 50, in his weird, hypocritical way, is imploring his listeners not to get hooked.