Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker has revealed that he quit smoking after being diagnosed with precancer of the oesophagus.
During a recent episode of the Big Bro With Kid Cudi podcast, the musician opened up about the time he decided to adopt a “healthier” lifestyle over 20 years ago.
“I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m having a son,” he said, referring to his first son, Landon, born in 2003. “So I started running to the freeway and back. I didn’t really know what I was doing – I was just like, ‘I gotta be healthy, I gotta be a badass dad!”
Barker went on to recall his past decision to “start balancing out” some of his “bad” habits with the “good” ones. He said getting more exercise also “helped [him] stay sober” from drugs.
“My running started getting bigger and more important to me than smoking,” he continued. “[…] It’s like therapy.”
As for his decision to stop smoking weed and cigarettes altogether, Barker shared: “I only quit because I got diagnosed with precancer of the oesophagus. ‘Cause I loved blunts and I would smoke too much. So that was the only [reason].”
The drummer said he asked his doctor if he was “serious” about the diagnosis. “He’s like, ‘This is your warning shot, Trav. Don’t fuck around. You’ve got to stop smoking’. Or I would’ve never stopped.
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“I thought I could be like Willie Nelson and smoke to the day I die, you know?”.
But the drummer admitted that he still “misses” smoking. Watch the full interview in the video above.
Earlier this year, Barker revealed he and Blink’s Tom DeLonge once got so high with Cypress Hill before playing a live show that they spent the entire gig itching to go home. “Smoking before shows is not my thing,” he said, describing the experience as “so awful”.
He previously explained that his 2008 plane crash made him quit prescription drugs, describing the ordeal as “my rehab”. Barker said: “Lose three of your friends and almost die? That was my wake-up call. If I wasn’t in a crash, I would have probably never quit.”
He said he used to smoke an “excessive amount of weed” and was addicted to painkillers, to the extent that he developed osteoporosis. Barker opened up about how the subsequent anxiety and depression following the accident were so great that he once “offered a friend $1milllion to kill him”.
Last month, Barker told fans that he’d undergone surgery because his “arm, hand and fingers [went] numb” after playing a live concert. “I did a nerve test Monday after my show and turns out I needed a cubital tunnel release to fix the nerve,” he wrote.
This summer saw the release of the new documentary Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear on Disney+. The project finds the musician “battling pain, grief and the thin line between survival and surrender”, per an official description.
Around the same time, Barker confirmed that Blink-182 were working on a new album – the follow-up to 2023’s ‘One More Time…’. Yesterday (November 12), the trio were announced as one of the headliners for Download 2027. They recently played a private show in Coachella Valley, California.