Sly Stone’s Daughter Says She Snorted Chalk to Emulate His Cocaine Use

Legendary funk musician Sly Stone‘s daughter, Phunne Stone, has revealed in a new documentary that she tried snorting chalk as a child to emulate her father’s cocaine use.

“We were out there [snorting] about 19 lines. We [were] sneezing and s—,” Phunne recalled in Hulu’s doc Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), which was released on Thursday, February 13.

The film delves into the highs and lows of Sly’s influential career with his band, Sly and the Family Stone, including his estrangement from his family and 1983 conviction for cocaine possession. Phunne said in one scene that she would find “four or five razor blades” around the house each time her father, 81, would visit during her childhood.

“[I lived] in an adult world, to where I thought I was grown,” Phunne explained.

One particularly shocking moment in the film saw Phunne reminiscing about how she’d once tried to imitate her father’s cocaine use.

“I went and grabbed me one [of the razors] and my box of chalk and I said, ‘We’re gonna do what the grown folks do.’ So I got my chalk and I chopped up about 37 lines of chalk out there and got the Monopoly money, rolled it up,” she remembered.

Phunne said that her late mother, Sly’s former bandmate Cynthia Robinson, intervened in her attempt to snort the chalk and then violently punished her.

“My mama came out and was like, ‘What are you doing?!’ I mean, it’s green and pink [on my face], because you know the chalk [is] different colors,” Phunne revealed. “And I’m telling mom, ‘Nothing!’ She beat the brakes off me.”

In another section of Sly Lives!, Phunne offered a sympathetic explanation for her father’s well-documented drug problem.

“I think that my dad is really actually shy, and I think drugs helped him be fearless,” she argued. “My mom loved him more than any man. She never dated another man after my dad. But he wasn’t always around when I lived with my mom.”

Her half-sister Novena Carmel recalled in the doc that she wasn’t aware of her father’s addiction as a very young child because she “didn’t have a lot of interaction” with him.

“When I was 10, I called his house and he was so out of it that he didn’t even know who I was,” she noted. “I didn’t like that. It was not a good feeling. At that point, I wanted something better for him.”

Sly’s son, Sylvester Stewart Jr, suggested that “hearing about [his dad] being arrested for drugs or whatever” made for a tough childhood.

“I always wanted him to be the person that I was always told he was when I was a baby… These last few years are the most normal times I’ve had with him,” Sylvester said.

The family went through periods of estrangement, especially during the times when Sly lived as a recluse, yet Phunne confirmed that she’d reconnected with her dad as an adult.

“Missing all that time with him, it was rough. But we rekindled our relationship. When we saw each other, he cried, I cried, everybody around us was crying,” she said. “And we was hugging and shaking and all that.”

The musician did not address his daughters’ recollections directly in Sly Lives! because he chose not to participate in director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson‘s project. Stone told The Guardian in 2023 that he’d “got clean” in 2019.

Instead of directly interviewing Sly, Questlove relied on the recollections of the star’s family, former bandmates and those influenced by him, including Andre 3000 of Outkast and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Sly remains one of the most important musicians of his generation, having been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. While Sly has shied away from the spotlight for decades, he did take part in a memorable Grammys tribute to his legacy in 2006 that saw him share the stage with John Legend, Maroon 5 and Ciara, among others.

Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) is streaming now on Hulu.