Travis Barker had a very good reason for giving up weed. During a sit-down with Kid Cudi on this week’s episode of the Big Bro with Kid Cudi podcast, the 50-year-old Blink-182 drummer said he had to stop smoking his beloved blunts after receiving a scary diagnosis.
“I only quit because I got diagnosed with precancer of the esophagus,” Barker told Cudder on Wednesday’s (Nov. 11) episode. “I loved blunts and I would smoke too much.” Barker described trying to be healthier for his kids and taking up running and boxing to get in shape after years of going for a six mile run and then celebrating afterward with a cigarette and a blunt.
And while he misses smoking — “I was so good at it” — Barker said he asked his doctor if the diagnosis was serious and he assured him it was. “He’s like, ‘This is your warning shot Trav. Don’t f–k around. You gotta stop smoking,’” he said the doc told him about his 10-15 blunt-per-day habit. “Or I would have never stopped. I thought I could be like Willie Nelson and smoke to the day I die. I feel like weed never hurt anybody, it just wasn’t right for me.”
Cudi countered that he had to go to rehab and “reestablish” his relationship with weed because he realized he was overdoing it at a time when he was smoking 15-20 blunts a day. “If I was awake, I was smoking, no matter what I was doing,” he said of his former habit.
Barker, who has a three-year-old son, Rocky Barker, with wife Kourtney Kardashian, as well as son Landon Barker, 23 and daughter Alabama Barker, 20 with his ex, Shanna Moakler — he also helped raise his stepdaughter, Atiana de la Hoya, 27 — admitted that he still thinks about firing up a blunt “all the time … I miss it. I’m not gonna lie.”
Luckily for him, running has helped keep him on the healthy path. “Many years later now, 20 years later, a couple miles a day keeps the demons away,” said Barker, who stopped using prescription drugs and other drugs when he was in a burn center for six months after surviving a deadly 2008 plane crash that killed four people, including his assistant and bodyguard. “My running started getting bigger and more important to me than smoking.”
He added, “It really helped me stay sober ’cause you can’t run you a half a marathon if you’re doing drugs. It’s gonna to be the hardest 13.1 miles of your life.”
Last month, Barker said he had undergone a cubital tunnel release surgery to fix a pinched nerve in his elbow that was causing numbness and weakness in his hands.
Watch Barker on Big Bro with Kid Cudi below.
