Juelz Santana turned 26 years old Wednesday, and friends and family threw a surprise get-together with cake and balloons. One thing the guest star of "Pop Champagne" was not doing at this party was sipping syrup. Santana wants to make sure everyone knows that although he did experiment with the concoction less than two years ago, he doesn't indulge now.

"For one, I stopped drinking it totally — that was a year and a half ago," Santana explained.

In the new edition of XXL, Juelz's onetime professional mentor Cam'ron is quoted as saying that the reason their relationship went sour was that Santana was addicted to sipping syrup. Juelz sat down with MTV News in an effort to clear his name and reasoned Cam's claims were just for publicity and to divert attention away from what Santana called less-than-above-board business practices.

"Me and Weezy was cool. When I saw him, I would drink it," Santana explained about his past use of syrup. "It was just, like — I don't even drink liquor. I'm a weed head. I smoke. Never popped a pill in my life. I drank the sizzurp, I felt it. I said, 'When I feel like doing it, I'mma do it.' But anybody that knows me — even Cam knows — I was never the type of person to let anything take control of me. I'm from Harlem. I felt [those claims] were way out for him. He planned that out. 'Let me figure out a way to tell them why I stopped speaking to Juelz. Oh! He was sipping sizzurp. They might go for that.' "

Independent of a possible reconciliation with Cam, the young Diplomat has moved on with his own squad, the Skull Gang. In addition to Santana's solo mixtape The Reagan Era, he's putting out another street CD for his unit, The Takeover Part 2.

"It's a movement at the same time," he said of the Gang. "It's kinda like the Dipset in the same way. I don't mean music-wise or crew-wise; I mean that everybody is individual artists and we came together to do the Skull Gang things so everybody could get their looks, and we can find out from the people to see who they wanna see more at the time. It's like a tool."

Juelz just completed guest verses for albums by The-Dream and Jadakiss. 'Kiss returned the favor and will appear on Juelz's upcoming Born to Lose, Bred to Win, which does not have a set release date.