Lil Wayne Drops By ‘Katie,’ Says He Quit Drinking Sizzurp And Is Ready To Retire

On the season two premiere of Katie Monday, Lil Wayne confirmed his plans to retire by the age of 35 and admitted that he had stopped drinking sizzurp, the dangerous cough syrup concoction blamed for landing him in the hospital last year and earlier this year.

The 30-year-old New Orleans native said that his seizures were caused by “dehydration, working too much, [and] no sleep” and that he found out he was “sort of epileptic.”

The rapper, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, said that his mother told him he fainted when he was a child, but that no one knew it was a seizure at the time. He said he hadn’t had a seizure in all that time until last year. He also said that he found out that a close cousin suffered from seizures, and that another died from one.

Couric asked if he believed sizzurp — a drink made from prescription-strength cough syrup, soda, and a Jolly Rancher — caused the seizures, and Lil Wayne said that he went to his doctor and told him that he hadn’t been drinking it as much as he used to. When the doctor asked him what else he had been doing, he said that he had been taking painkillers.

“I had been taking pain pills, and what he found out was that those pain pills consist of codeine as well,” he said. “So the lack of drinking codeine the way I did drink it, it was kind of like a reaction of stopping the drug.”

When asked why he stopped drinking sizzurp, the “No Worries” rapper said because the doctors and his mother told him to.

“She did,” Lil Wayne said. “I was doing it too much, and the doctor kind of told me, ‘We can’t tell you what to do, but I suggest that your mom tell you to stop,'” he said.

“And she did?” Couric asked.

Lil Wayne also gushed about his children and said that he wanted to retire so that he could spend more time with them. Katie Couric asked him what he was most looking forward to.

“Whatever they want to be, whatever they want to do. I don’t want to have no influence on, ‘Hey, you must do this, you must do that,’ because I didn’t have that,” he said. “Because I didn’t have that, I grew up to be exactly what I wanted to be, and who I wanted to be. I want that for all of my kids.”

When Couric asked if he really thought he’d be able to retire at 35, Lil Wayne said, “I know I’ll be able to retire at 35 ’cause I’m so ready to retire now.”