Rapper T.I. is confident he's broken the drug habit that landed him in prison last year (10), insisting he's now "clean and sober".
The Live Your Life hitmaker, real name Clifford Harris, Jr., walked free from a halfway house last month (Sep11) after serving an 11-month sentence for a probation violation, stemming from an arrest for possession of ecstasy.
And he claims he has since kicked his penchant for "recreational" substances, which he first dabbled with when he was a teenager, growing up on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia.
During an appearance on U.S. talk show The View on Tuesday (18Oct11), he said, "I've accepted that in order to have a different result, you have to take a different approach, which is staying clean and sober...
"I understand why people are so critical of me, and I accept that. Nobody is tougher on me than I am on myself. And I'm not trying to make excuses and I accept responsibility for everything that I've done.
"People say, 'Well how can he just make that mistake again and again?' I think that they don't take into consideration how long, prior to me being T.I., how long that I had been living the life I'd been living, since I was about 14, 15, 16 years old, and I'm 31 now.
"I broke the habit, I think it was more recreational than anything else, and it's just a discipline factor."