White Girls?

Sooo Cocaine is back in style now? I guess everything happens in cycles so it's time for young people to to start mimicking the Rappers. Now I say this at the expense of sounding really old but I pray that the really cool young people of the world get hip and dictate what's cool....and determine that cocaine is not cool. I like Lil Wayne, Gym Class Heroes, N.E.R.D., and all the rest of them but this drug talk is wack. Sponsors should be pulling their support from these idiots...not just because it's the right thing to do but because it's bad for business.

Here's the science:

The illegal drug game has always supported the music business. From illicit Opium sale and use supporting classical music to Bootlegging alcohol and tobacco supporting Jazz, music and drugs have been financial sister and brother. But in this stressful day and age, where free goods are constantly leveraged to support more expensive utilitarian products, we don't need the drugs. The drugs act as a bleeding ulcer that drains the lifeline from what could be good business. The music business is already struggling and doesn't need to promote drug use in order to create zombies. When Mozart used Opium and promoted it, people still had to buy access to the music. When watershed Jazz Musicians promoted tobacco and whiskey, people still had to buy access to the music. But when Lil Wayne promotes cocaine use, he's promoting a lifestyle that takes away from the music and fuels other economies....not ours. Cocaine supports Iran/Contra types of economies and agendas.

See what people like Lil Wayne, Gym Class Heroes, N.E.R.D. and the like don't realize is that we (young black people) have always been on the bottom of the drug game totem pole. No matter how hard we try, we will always be on the bottom because it was designed against us: By the turn of the twentieth century, the addictive properties of cocaine had become clear to many, and the problem of cocaine abuse began to capture public attention in the United States. The dangers of cocaine abuse became part of a moral panic that was tied to the dominant racial and social anxieties of the day. In 1903, the American Journal of Pharmacy stressed that most cocaine abusers were “bohemians, gamblers, high- and low-class prostitutes, night porters, bell boys, burglars, racketeers, pimps, and casual laborers.” In 1914, Dr. Christopher Koch of Pennsylvania’s State Pharmacy Board made the racial innuendo explicit, testifying that, “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” Mass media manufactured an epidemic of cocaine use among African Americans in the Southern United States to play upon racial prejudices of the era, though there is little evidence that such an epidemic actually took place. In the same year, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act outlawed the use of cocaine in the United States. This law incorrectly referred to cocaine as a narcotic, and the misclassification passed into popular culture. As stated above, cocaine is a stimulant, not a narcotic.- Wikipedia

So Rappers....why promote something that will quadruple your chances of heart attack? Why take a drug that causes toxins that lead to respiratory failure, stroke and cerebral hemorrhaging? Why push a drug on your audience that will not benefit you? In fact, the rise in cocaine use will directly cause an already receding economy to slide further and further reduce financial support of music products (tickets, mp3's, cd's, etc.).

I write this blog with the assumption that we all know that there are NO RAPPERS that sell drugs on any meaningful level and thus DO NOT benefit (directly or indirectly) from the rise in drug use.