How Tech N9ne almost died from an ecstasy overdose
Tech N9ne has made a career out of being “a fuck-up.” That’s his own claim, one he made during a 2011 interview with Complex. But it’s not all bad, because he turns his mistakes and failures into music.
“I’ve fucked up a lot of shit in my life, and I rap about it,” he admitted, before speaking about his greatest fuck-up of all: his relationship to drugs. Tech N9ne has taken an awful lot of them, and the habit very nearly left him dead.
Asked to reveal what drugs he used to take at the height of his misuse, Tech was thorough. “Ecstasy, acid, Adderall, GHB, which is a date-rape drug,” he replied. “I never did any coke because my nose had bad sinuses. I went to a gang of coke parties, but I never did it. I never shot anything else. I hated needles before I started getting tattoos so I’ve never shot any heroin or anything. Thank God. Never smoked any crack.”
But the drugs that he did use, he used extensively. “Ecstasy was my favorite,” he said. “I did acid every once in a while, mushrooms every once in a while. GHB on top of all that, so I’d be swerving a little bit. It kind of makes you woozy and shit. But that was about it.”
Tech recounted that he took his first pill in 1998, but, before long, his tolerance had risen and he needed to take more and more in order to feel the drug’s effects. The woman who had sold him his first pill, “this white chick named Michelle,” was insistent that he take more. “Here,” he recalled Michelle encouraging him, “try another one, try another one, try another one. This is a red devil, try this one.”
The rapper started to regularly pop pills with Michelle, and it soon became a problem. “That was in ’98,” he noted, “so by 2001, I’d built up to where I had to take three.”
Tech developed a reputation as a user of pills, and he was more than happy to play up to it. He recalled a bleak memory of when he used to head inside strip clubs to place pills on strippers’ tongues. “Some of the strippers didn’t even know me and I said, ‘Open your mouth,’” he recalled of his sordid habit. “And I’d give them an X-pill, and they took it because of who I was. And they’re still on it. It makes me feel bad. I’ve seen a lot of them and they’re not doing too well.”
Tech’s own habit got so bad and reckless that, during a party in LA in 2001, it nearly killed him. He started out taking three pills that day, before taking three more—and then some more after that. He ended up taking 15 in total, a terrifying amount. But despite his precarious, potentially lethal state, he didn’t go to the hospital.
“I nursed myself back,” he said. “I knew if you drank too much water it’d swell your brain and you’d die. So I drank a lot of orange juice and water here and there. I couldn’t sleep. It’s hard to explain. It’s like you close your eyes and you just get real dizzy. It’s like a fucking bumble bee in your head that makes you dizzy and you can’t close your eyes for real.”
Tech believes that drinking the orange juice saved his life, and, ultimately, he made it through that nightmarish episode. But his drug habit did catch up with him in the end by ruining his marriage. He eventually knew he needed to kick it when his young daughter looked at him and it “felt like she knew that I was high.” He decided to get clean then and there, and, as he happily declared in the interview, he did.