The heavy drug addiction Freddie Gibbs overcome: “I had to look myself in the mirror”
Drugs have been a troublesome force throughout Freddie Gibbs’ life, going as far back as his teenage years.
When he was 19, Gibbs enlisted in the US military—but he was kicked out after getting caught smoking weed. This wouldn’t prove to be the only time that drug use got him into trouble, as he eventually came to suffer with a deep addiction. At its worst point, his dependency was truly profound.
Gibbs deals with this subject with striking honesty on the track ‘Freddie Gordy,’ which appears on his second album Shadow of a Doubt, released in 2015. In it he paints a picture of life on the streets, while he also specifically admits to bearing “addictions of my own, boy.”
“The pills into laced blunts got me gone, boy,” he raps in the song, laying out some of the ways he used to get high. “The Oxycontin and heavy syrup got me looking in the mirror saying, ‘Is you a dope fiend or a dope boy?’”
As Gibbs admitted in an interview with Vice in 2015, during which he reflected on ‘Freddie Gordy,’ these lyrics really did reflect a period in his life when his addiction was out of control. “I used to use drugs heavy,” he said.
Gibbs listed some of his drugs of choice from that period, and it’s an extensive one. “Codeine, Xanax, Oxycodone, and all of that shit,” he said. “I used to lace my blunts with that shit. Cocaine blunts. Blunts dipped. If there’s a drug out there I probably tried it.”
The song captured how bad a situation Gibbs had been in at the height of his addiction. “On the ‘Freddy Gordy’ song I basically named the cocktail of drugs that I was using at the time,” he explained, “and I said that I had to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Are you a dope fiend or are you a dope boy?’ You could be selling a whole bunch of crack, but you’re giving all that money back to the pill man, the lean man, the powder man, or the molly man to get your fix.”
Quite aside from the effects drug addiction has on a sufferer’s health, the financial impact can be profound, too. “I hear all these n—as rapping about whipping a brick,” said Gibbs, “but then they say they’re getting high off six other drugs. You can’t be making a lot of money if you’re spending your money on six other drugs.”
While Gibbs clearly doesn’t advocate for people getting caught up by addiction, he stressed in the Vice interview that he didn’t want to come off as judgemental. “There’s just shit like that to enlighten motherfuckers a little bit,” he said. “I never want to take the position like I’m preaching to n—as. But you have to bring them in and make them relate to your struggle.”