White Trauma and Drug Addiction
I’m on that dope
It ain’t no secret, but that shit ain’t shive
How Ima stay high, stay shive, and get mine?
I can’t do it so I gotta try and kick the habit
Or that million I want, I might not ever have it
(B.G. — “Doing Bad” 1996)
One of my favorite rap songs as a child was about a 15 year old junkie trying to shake his drug habit. The title was “Doing Bad” by Cash Money rapper B.G. As a child I couldn’t fully comprehend the lyrics. I didn’t know what heroin was, nor did I understand the graveness of a teenager being addicted to it. What captivated me was Mannie Fresh’s production, and B.G.’s voice. He sounded like a kid, but there was so much pain and stress in his voice. He convinced the listener that he wasn’t just a good rhyming teenage rapper, but was battling his demons through Rap. He sounded like a seasoned vet, letting you know he was addicted and there was nothing “cool” about it.
In a 2009 interview, B.G. (born Christopher Dorsey) explained how he became addicted to heroin in 1995 after one of his friends was murdered on New Orleans’ blood-soaked streets (the city had about 365 murders that year, an average of a murder a day):
It started when one of my lil homies got killed, and he used to snort dope. After his funeral, me and my lil potnas was like ‘man we gonna snort a bag for our potna’. I snorted it, and I liked it.
B.G. rapped about his addiction on multiple songs throughout his teenage years, with his most potent take on the subject coming in 1997 (at age 16) on “I Be Thinking”.
That heroin hit my block, opened it like an earthquake
Niggas graduating on their 15th birthday
Some snorting it, some spiking it
That shit be cut heavy, and them niggas still be liking it
(B.G. — “I Be Thinking” 1997)
By the time he was 23, B.G. was a two time convicted felon, both charges were for possession of heroin. His label mate (and fellow Hot Boyz member), Turk, was also an addict, and gave his testimony on songs like “I Been Through Dat”. Even James Booker, the New Orleans piano legend, shared the same struggle throughout his life. In 1970 he was convicted of drug possession and was sent to Angola Penitentiary, Louisiana’s maximum security prison. He died in 1983 from Kidney failure as a result of heroin and alcohol abuse.
Over the past couple years I’ve been seeing the term “Opioid Crisis” across the web, which made me wonder: why now? Louisiana had an alarming number of overdoses in 2016 (about 561). That number attributes to more than just heroin, being that White Americans have become addicted to prescription pain pills and other opiates. And that was the answer. In the 1990s, when Black teens in New Orleans were addicted to heroin in attempts to cope with the devastation in there neighborhoods and broken family life, there was no opioid crisis; just niggas getting’ high. But now that others have become affected, something must be done. In the words of Brian Broome, white means victim; Black means addict.
Rap music was invented at the perfect time, and evolved at the perfect rate. It gave a voice to Black youth who were misunderstood by both whites and older Blacks. Because of artists like B.G. the countless number of kids addicted to drugs during the 1990s, who may have died during that era, will not be forgotten. When you get past the bravado, you see that they were broken kids, calling for help, who became victims of the Clintons’ “super predator” speech. These rappers were ahead of their time, for they called it a crisis before the media did.
