I just finished reading Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction. I haven't read Nic Sheff's version of events (Tweak) just yet, but have already come away learning that meth is a super nasty drug, worse than all the others in its addictive nature and the toll it takes on users. One aspect of David Sheff's story that struck me was how he felt Nic really glamorized artists who used or drank excessively -- from Kurt Cobain to Charles Bukowski. These are, among others, the romanticized artists/addicts for many upper middle class white kids like Nic. As the book rightly points out, drug addiction does not discriminate -- people of all races and class backgrounds can become junkies. And while I've never been one draw a causal link between media young people consume and specific behaviors, i.e. a video game or song doesn't directly cause a killing rampage, I do think they are part of a mix of influences that are not completely benign -- especially when a teen is troubled to begin with. Addicts tend to be predisposed to become addicted. Kurt Cobain didn't cause Nic's addiction, but he helped him romanticize it.

Because of this, I found this study out of U.C. Berkeley about the increased glamorization of drug use in rap music really interesting. According to the press release, "a new study finds that references to illegal drug use in rap music jumped sixfold in the two decades since 1979, the year Sugar Hill Gang's 'Rapper's Delight' hit the charts and introduced to a mainstream audience a music genre born from inner-city America."

More from the study:

Herd and her team examined the lyrics of 341 of the most popular rap songs - as determined by Billboard and Gavin music rating services - from 1979 to 1997. Researchers coded songs for drug mentions, behaviors and contexts surrounding the mention of drugs, as well as the attitudes and consequences stemming from illicit drug use.

Of the 38 most popular rap songs between 1979 and 1984, only four, or 11 percent, contained drug references. In the early 1990s, the percentage of rap songs with drug references experienced a sharp jump to 45 percent, and steadily increased to 69 percent of the 125 top rap songs between 1994 and 1997.

The study found that drug references in early rap songs - "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash, "Crack Monster" by Kool Moe Dee and "Night of the Living Baseheads" by Public Enemy - often depicted the destructiveness of cocaine and, particularly, of crack, its freebase form.

This cautionary tone about cocaine gave way to rap lyrics in the early 1990s that increasingly portrayed marijuana use as a positive activity. The UC Berkeley study documented a threefold increase between 1979 and 1997 in rap songs' mentions of marijuana and marijuana-stuffed cigars, or "blunts," and noted marijuana's association in those songs with creativity, wealth and status.

Herd noted that the study puts hard numbers to a trend that has long been noted anecdotally among observers of the music industry. She referenced a 1996 article in Vibe, a magazine that covers hip hop culture, highlighting the success of Cypress Hill's 1991 debut album celebrating marijuana use as a turning point in rap music's popularization of the drug. The Vibe article noted that other rap artists, including Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, soon followed suit with their own references to marijuana as an appealing drug to use.

Herd said that after rap albums celebrating marijuana use started going platinum in the early 1990s, drug references became increasingly common in rap music, as if they were a key ingredient to success.

The study didn't examine whether there was a link between the music and increased drug use. And honestly, I don't think marijuana can be compared to crack or meth, though many in the addiction community believe it is the gateway drug for addicts. But I imagine that for an urban version of "Nic" or even a suburban version of "Nic" who is a rap fan, the glamorization or romanticizing of drugs by some hip hop artists acts to validate the choices this young addict would probably end up making anyway. Does music play a part in a young person's choice to experiment with drugs? Maybe. Maybe not. That said, Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath were definitely part of the soundtrack to my own experimentation.

Posted by anastasia