On International Overdose Awareness Day, around 75 community members and stakeholders packed into Red Emma’s coffee shop in Baltimore to honor loved ones who lost their lives to overdose — and advocate for steps forward.
Mayor Brandon Scott said that nearly two thousand people have died by overdose in Baltimore City in the past two years.
“That, as you know, trumps gun violence. But very rarely do you hear anyone talking about the neighbors that we lose to overdose,” Scott said. “We all know why that is. We have to continue to call out those who continue to think of folks with addiction issues as less than them, because they are our neighbors.”
Scott urged attendees at Thursday’s eighth annual overdose awareness event run by the city health department to join him in pushing for overdose prevention sites. These sites are staffed with trained medical professionals to ensure safe drug use, and provide local support services.
“We're going to need everyone in the fight as we bring overdose prevention sites here to Baltimore,” Scott said. “Saving lives today gives people the opportunity and the option to make better choices tomorrow.”
Scott has been advocating for overdose prevention sites since 2021, but legislation has yet to pass.
Attendee numbers dwindled as programming shifted to a panel discussion about youth opioid use, and the glamorization found in hip-hop music.
“Everybody else dipped once the cameras left,” said David Fakunle, a public health professor at Morgan State University.
Fakunle joined local comedian Fred Watkins and 19-year-old urban journalist Isaiah Young as panelists.
“Hip-hop is one of the most popular storytelling media we have. It has been for 50 years,” Fakunle said. But the content has changed over the years, Young added, focusing on “percocets and killing and drugs.”
All panelists agreed that rappers aren’t going to stop writing lyrics about drugs. But what’s missing for children is the context.
“Most people aren’t partying on percocets. They’re suffering on percocets,” Fakunle said. “It’s not a happy ending, as hip-hop — the way a lot of people may be exposed to it — thinks.”
Children are especially impressionable to what their favorite hip-hop artists seem to endorse — “especially if the parents aren’t involved, if you don’t have a lot of role models,” Young said. That’s why community members and loved ones can make the biggest difference.
“Over the life course, from childhood to adolescence to being a young adult, it’s the people we interact with everyday that have the biggest influence. That’s the stuff that will actually linger across time,” Fakunle added. “So hip-hop can do whatever the hell it wants. It’s us that makes the difference.”
Watkins said it starts with education.
“It’s backwards to expect kids to listen to these lyrics and not be influenced heavily by them,” he said. “If we all believe we have the power in our own lives to identify new value systems to these youth, then we can change it from the inside out.”
And from a policy standpoint, Fakunle said, it starts with identifying the causes.
“If I’m dealing with poverty, reduced resources, a piss-poor education system, a system that dehumanizes me…if that is a system in which you were born into and live every single day of your life, would you not take drugs too?” he asked.
Children and teenagers see these conditions reflected in hip-hop music, which was born out of resistance and anger towards similar systems, Fakunle said.
“And if what you’re now hearing is that, ‘oh, not only can it make you escape the realities of your life, you can have fun doing it,’ I genuinely can’t blame you if you wanted to take a try,” he said.
“So if you want the biggest bang for your buck, stop worrying about the symptom, worry about the cause,” Fakunle said. “And the causes are consistent.”
