The child-soldiers of Sierra Leone, coerced into violence by the older men who kidnapped them, were often given doses of "brown-brown," a dangerous cocktail of gunpowder and cocaine. They used it to prepare for killing.
Ecstasy is quickly becoming the Oakland street wars' own version of brown-brown.
A bit of background: For the past nine years, I've been facilitating weekly writing workshops in Alameda County's Juvenile Hall, for a regional publication called The Beat Within. The Beat, as the kids and staff call it, is published weekly and has become a de facto paper of record for locked-up teens throughout the Bay Area. Its readers and reporters are incarcerated young people -- they are the source of much of the region's mayhem, but they are also victims of that mayhem, child-soldiers in a war that we are all losing.
As the kids try to understand and communicate how they wound up in jail, why their friends are dying, why they are caught up in the system and why their streets are so violent, they also provide many of the answers that we are all looking for, when we seek to diagnose the troubles of our community. Here in Oakland, specifically, the X factor in many of their recent writings has been a literal X factor -- the popular club drug, Ecstasy.
Throughout the 1990s, Ecstasy did not appear much in The Beat's pages, though drugs were of course a popular topic. There was a general tendency for particular kinds of drug use to follow racial lines: white and Latino kids often described harrowing experiences with heroin or crystal meth, while the black kids preferred staggering quantities of weed and alcohol (though they sold crack, they rarely used it).
I remember a moment when I and my co-workers considered, with a chill, what would happen if crystal meth, also known as speed or crank, ever hit the black communities in Oakland, in which gun violence had historically been most prominent.
But the kids first started mentioning doing Ecstasy, or "poppin' pills" as they called it, we joked that the "hug drug" might end up ending gang warfare for good: Guns traded in for glow-sticks, gang colors replaced by rainbows, kids forgetting to fight and suddenly feeling an urgent desire to share their feelings. Historically, ecstasy has always generally perceived as a happy pill, one that led to earnest heart-to-hearts in a warehouse stuffed with beanbags; one you didn't mix with alcohol, because all you needed was an open heart and a big bottle of water.
Ecstasy redux, known as thizz by the artists and marketers of the worst aspects of the "hyphy movement" -- i.e. the rap music of Bay Area artists like E40 and Mac Dre -- and by the gazillion record labels and club parties with the word thizz in their titles, is a much more sinister drug, both in its chemical makeup and the way it's taken. By 2006, we were publishing dozens of pieces by detainees who mixed thizz with alcohol, marijuana and cough syrup. They would tell of popping handfuls of pills at a time (one boy wrote that he'd taken 80 over the course of one week). They'd write about guns going off at parties because someone was "off a pill"; they'd write about nightmare trips from pills they'd taken without really knowing what was inside; a 16-year-old who calls himself Al Boo Boo wrote that thizz destroyed his life, in a piece called, appropriately, "Thizz is Not What It Is."
The Ecstasy these kids are taking is basically speed, and it's as devastating in its own way as its more vilified cousin, crystal meth. But don't take my word for it. Here's a poem by a locked up teenager:
Don't Pop Pills
Just like Whitney said -- "crack is whack"
Well pills drain spinal fluid from your back
They have symbols on them of things we see today
Like Safeway, Nike sign, scorpions, McDonalds and even Mac Dre
Mac Dre is a big influence fo' poppin' thizz
But he didn't care 'cause that's his bizz
A pill is mixed with every drug except for weed
The reason it keeps you up all night is 'cause of the speed
Whatever mood you in, the pill gives you more of that feeling
So if you mad and violent then you might go start killin'
It puts holes in your brain and you could die
I have popped pills before but that ain't my type of high
You might as well smoke crack 'cause thizz is a lot of drugs
but since yo' patnas do it, you think you more of a thug
You think you do stuff 'cause you thizzin' and got a gun
But you will see what happens in the long run- De Angelo
Young De Angelo has served up a precise of the intersection between thizz culture and what my colleague, David Muhammad, called "the culture of death." He points to the inability to know for sure what is in these pils, their high speed content, as well as their pervasiveness our local rap music (See for example the output of the Vallejo-based Thizz Records label, which was founded by the slain
hip-hop hero Mac Dre).
Finally, he underscores the way it intensifies violent impulses: Whatever mood you in, the pill gives you more of that feeling/So if you mad and violent then you might go start killin'. Over the past months, many of our young writers have echoed his sentiments, and they write often taking pills to "get up the heart" for committing robberies, carjackings, and worse -- revenge killings.
I am not suggesting that Ecstasy is the root cause of any of our troubles, or of the rising rates of violent crime. It is, however, a disturbing new agent of destruction, especially because our kids are consciously using it to blunt both their consciences and their instincts for self-preservation.
They already think no one cares about what they do. Now they have found a drug that keeps them from caring as well.