Lakers' Metta World Peace: 'I Learned How To Cook Crack At 13'

While most 13-year-olds are playing video games and basketball, Metta World Peace of the Los Angeles Lakers, had different hobbies. 

As a guest on ESPN’s “Highly Questionable,” World Peace admitted he learned how to cook crack shortly after becoming a teenager. World Peace grew up Queensbridge, New York, which has famously produced Lamar Odom, Nas, and Mobb Deep.

“I was never like rebellious, but I was always interested in different things,” he says. “I learned how to cook crack at the age of 13. So that was something I’m not proud of obviously, but it was just something that was introduced to me at an early age. I got away from that.”

The Laker shared his scariest moment from the neighborhood on Wednesday’s show: 

“One day I was at my cousin’s house and Mobb Deep, the Rap group, they used to live next door, same floor,” he says. “So my cousin, they was cutting up the crack and everything, police start knocking on the door. I was about to flush the drugs down the toilet. My cousin was like, ‘Yo, don’t flush the drugs. That’s a lot of money. It was a lot of money.’ I was like, ‘Yo, we gotta throw the drugs away or throw it out the window.’ So that was scary because my cousin was trying to save the drugs. Hopefully the police leave and I’m just trying to not get arrested. I was about 13 years old at the time. But the police left. Gratefully they left. It was a tough situation.”

World Peace says he thought cooking crack was perfectly normal at first. Then, he saw what did it to users. He also feared what could happen to a drug dealer on the streets. 

Metta shares that his harsh upbringing caused mental health issues he’s dealt with throughout his career and still struggles with today. 

“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.”