Vic Mensa has been a household name since the early 2010s and, without vast amounts of commercial success, has consistently released high-quality material. After uploading his debut solo mixtape Innately in 2013, the Chicago native saw a copious amount of downloads on DatPiff and ascended the music industry ranks from there.
Following this success, Mensa opened for acts including the likes of J Cole, Danny Brown and Wale in Chicago. Now, as a certified emcee, Mensa is attracting magazines for interviews on a regular basis, and in a recent interview with SPIN magazine, the lyrics revealed how, at one point in time, he became suicidal.
During the conversation, Mensa revealed that, during the early stages of his career, he continued the drug experimentation he had started during his adolescence. More specifically, he unveiled that he used Magic Mushrooms as a “creative crutch.” Eventually, he says that it made him suicidal.
Reflecting on his addiction, Mensa disclosed, “The first drug I really felt dependent on was mushrooms. I started doing them abusively. Probably 100 times a year when I was like 19. But it wasn’t soul-searching. I started to lean on it as a creative crutch, and eventually, it just stopped working, and I started having bad trips — I would feel like my throat was closing and I was dying.”
However, he revealed that as pressure to produce interesting and boundary-pushing music mounted, he began abusing ecstasy. Explaining his predicament, Mensa recalled, “In the pursuit of boosted creativity, I started doing a lot of molly and ecstasy. I was going to the bathroom in the middle of a studio session and railing molly with the powder falling on the ground. And I’m rolling up a dollar bill, on my hands and knees, railing it off the bathroom floor.”
Unfortunately, this led to Mensa abusing the ADHD drug Adderall to cope with the comedown of his high. Detailing this, the rhymer (real name Victor Mensah) continued, “When the molly crashed, I was so depressed and started snorting Adderall, then that stopped working. I would use each drug to the max until it stopped working, and so I was hellbent on killing myself. I was on a full warpath of suicide.”
Strangely enough, the ‘Down On My Luck’ performer had an epiphany during an ayahuasca ceremony in San Diego and realised that he had a lot of deep-seated pain and baggage. You can see Mensa’s SPIN cover below.