The one drug Machine Gun Kelly would never take again: “It was so dark”
Machine Gun Kelly has struggled with substance abuse over the years. He’s had a bad relationship with alcohol, marijuana and pills such as hydrocodone, Percocet and Vyvanse amid mental health issues. However, one drug stands out to him as the worst he’s ever taken due to the experience he had while high, as well as how addictive it is.
Oxymorphone is an opioid analgesic used to treat severe pain, with its effects lasting around three to four hours. MGK once took some under the brand name Opana, and had an experience he would never like to go through again.
“It’s like heroin,” he told GQ. “We snorted it. It was so dark. I’d never recommend it to anybody. One: it’s absolutely addictive. Two: to be addicted and to want that feeling over and over again… I’m not a person who goes down and then has a rush of positivity to bring themselves back up. I’m the type of person who likes to listen to sad music when I’m sad. I love to wallow and just sink and sink, so that’s why I’ll never touch that one again.”
In 2024, MGK revealed he was one year sober after quitting alcohol and drugs, claiming his ex-partner, actress Megan Fox, played a vital role in helping him get clean. “I don’t drink anymore,” he said on the Dumb Blonde podcast. “I haven’t drank since last August. That was my first time I ever went to rehab. Megan has for sure been extremely helpful in dealing with the kind of psychological withdrawals that come with getting off drugs.
“I continue to embrace that this journey is gonna be hard for me, but I accept it and forgive myself. I’m also really hard on myself, very self-deprecating. I’m just happy that I’m able to start to be comfortable enough to show people who I am because I kind of depended on my art to do that.”
However, Machine Gun Kelly’s journey to sobriety began from a conversation with his daughter, Casie, who was 11 or 12 at the time. “It started with my daughter saying, ‘Dad, you know I can tell when you’re high?’ It was the ultimate letdown,” he said on Million Dollaz Worth of Game. “It took me a while afterward, because obviously drugs have a vice grip on you. That was step one for me. As a father and as a man, to be the father I wish my dad would have been, I have to break this generational curse for my kid.”
MGK was signed to Diddy’s Bad Boy Records from 2011 to 2024. Between his debut album, 2012’s Lace Up, and 2022’s Mainstream Sellout, he released six projects on the label. Back when he was actively taking drugs, he claimed Diddy gave him something that made him feel like he had been partying for days. He asked for something to help him sleep on a flight, but it had the opposite effect of knocking him out.
“I’d smoked something that Puff had given me,” he said. “It was as if I had partied, like, three nights straight. I was like, ‘I’m about to go to the airport — I need something that’ll knock me out.’ It totally did the opposite. I was doing crazy dance moves to the weirdest music for 20 minutes straight, like, while he was on the phone. And I was just outside the window looking in while he was looking at me like, ‘Man, this kid’s nuts.’”