This is one of my favorite songs by Atlanta rapper/singer Future and production outfit 808 Mafia. For those familiar with my own musical output you won’t be surprised to hear the combination of melancholic pretty strings, 808s and weird synthetic sounds. Future sounds great on it even though the lyrics are not particularly profound or interesting overall, there are flashes of vulnerability “I’m an addict and can’t even hide it”. For those unfamiliar, the song is about getting high drinking codeine infused cough syrup aka ‘lean’ or ‘purple drank’. The taking of opioids has permeated southern hiphop culture more and more intensely ever since 3-6 mafia sang Sippin on Some Sizzurp in 1999. Drinking lean has long been a part of the Houston rap culture as well, and has killed many rappers there via overdose, including Pimp C, Big Moe and many others. It’s part of a larger and ongoing pattern of opioid abuse which has been complicating the American narrative of the so called “War on Drugs” for years.
Historically the war on drugs could be characterised as ‘bad foreigners bringing illegal drugs into the country which can be combated by militarized police’. The opiates which are triggering this new wave of addiction are not actually imported by cartels, instead they’re produced by domestic pharma companies like Perdue and prescribed legally by doctors. I remember having an appointment to get my wisdom tooth pulled in my twenties and having my dentist prescribe me a bottle of 30 Percocet for the pain. I was high for weeks.
The fact that in it’s current phase the people who are despairing and overdosing on opiates are much more white and rural has undermined the existing narrative and shifted the story to one of a crisis which requires medical intervention, as opposed to during the 80s when black Americans were afflicted by crack cocaine (imported by the Reagan/Bush CIA as part of Iran Contra, we should note) and the response was harsh sentencing laws and the construction of a massive prison industrial complex. As recognition grows that white people use the same volume of illegal drugs that people of color do and a new generation of politicians take power we are seeing a fairly rapid crumbling of militarized drug enforcement as a viable domestic industry, with the outright legalization of marijuana and the focus on treatment with regard to white opioid addiction as the front of that wave.
Speaking to a friend who is a legal-aid lawyer in Brooklyn when I was home for the holidays she observed that with the shift in drug sentencing policy, there may be a lack of bodies to support the prison industrial complex as it has been constructed, and potentially this may be an economic motivation for the shift to focus on immigrant detention. With the lack of draconian drug laws to use as a pretext to lock up a seemingly endless supply of people of color, a new source of non-white politically vulnerable bodies is needed to maintain the businesses which administrate their punishment. This is an interesting lens to view the current US president’s repeated banging of the drum of illegal immigration, and the current government shutdown. Just as external national threats and enemies must be manufactured to support the finances of the military industrial complex, so must enemies be created to support the domestic prison industrial complex, including thousands of jobs in the Republican leaning areas these detention centers are usually located in.
Bonus extra credit listening for a more introspective Future, also terrific: