(AllHipHop News) The opioid epidemic is paramount touching every region of the country.
It spares no one, regardless of race, gender or social class. Hip-Hop has learned this lesson the hard way since a several of the genre’s best-known rappers have lost their lives (recently) to this particular kind of addiction.
Some, like mega-producer and rapper Timbaland, have dug deep to overcome their dependence demons.
Wednesday on “The Tamron Hall Show,” Timbaland came clean about his struggle with being addicted to prescription drugs for pain.
He said, “It takes over you. It’s something that takes over your body. I don’t want to glorify it, but it feels amazing. It makes you feel like a superhero. It gave me confidence.”
Now you may wonder how one of the architects of the early 2000’s Hip-Hop and R&B sound could be so successful under the influence, but he explained how the “feel good” experienced for a moment trumped his productivity.
“The pills make you function, but sometimes you would nod off while people were talking to you because it would make you fall asleep, but it would make you function because everything feels great.” He continued to tell Hall, “It could be a bad moment going on, but the pills block all that out. I thought some of the pills were making me create, but as I went back to listen to some of my music I was like oh this is not a creation, this is a hot mess.”
Timbaland was lucky. There was something inside of him that did not let the painkillers win, salvaging his new family and saving his life.
“My marriage was new and I was scared of it and I think the pills helped me deal with the marriage at the time,” he courageously states and added that his children were key in him getting clean and sober. “I kept looking like I want to be here for my kids and it just hit me one day. I didn’t go to rehab, I cut cold turkey. My kids were my backbone to living.”
Now he is making his sobriety public with hopes it can save the lives of others. Like the young rapper Juice WRLD who lost his life in December.
RIP JUICEWRLD
— Timbaland (@Timbaland) December 9, 2019
The Virginia hitmaker has made this his purpose, to shed ego, celebrity and becoming vulnerable may be the only way to spread this message.
“I think people forget that we are still human and I had to realize that I’m still that guy from the country, I’m just great at music. I felt like I was abusing my gift that God gave me and when I was on the drugs he took that gift away.”
