Shock jocks John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, known as John and Ken on KFI in Los Angeles, called Whitney Houston a crack ho.
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The shock jocks have since apologized and been suspended, but their ignorance is just a small fraction of the forgotten war on drugs.
Since Whitney’s death, there have been a few jokes about her drug use and many people are failing to realize what the drug epidemic has done to America. The effects of drugs were so bad that before the war on terror, America waged war on drugs.
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Needless to say, that war has all but been abandoned. Whitney was an addict, a product of the times, and quite possibly a casualty of war. Sure, she didn’t die from illegal drugs, but the drugs she did in her past already took a large part of the Whitney we knew through her music and movies.
Whitney was a drug addict just like so many others from the rough areas of Newark, NJ. She went on Oprah and admitted to smoking weed laced with rock cocaine or CRACK!
I grew up in and around that area, and I’ve seen first hand what drugs do to people. My neighborhood in the late ’80s and early ’90s resembled The Walking Dead because it was polluted with crack addicts. Drug vials littered the sidewalks and almost monthly someone I knew was going to a funeral.
Over the course of four years before I ever attended a day of Junior High School, I lost half of my family, most of them to drugs. My four uncles, my grandmother, both grandfathers, and the worst of them all, my favorite aunt.
I sat in her hospital room as she was dying, her body was frail, her skin so rough, dry, and wrinkled and she had given up trying to put lotion on it. I sat next to her bedside as she begged for another day on the streets. She begged her sisters to sign her out of the hospital so she could get another hit. She just wanted to die high and happy.
Sure it’s funny to laugh at an addict. It’s easy to point fingers and say that no one forced the addict to take the drugs! We all get a laugh when someone says, “crack is wack” or “show me the receipts.” But at the end of the day, the war on drugs was cut short by the war on terrorism and America’s latest addiction: legal prescription drugs, which have killed way too many of our celebrities if you ask me.
Let Whitney rest in peace, stop the name-calling.
Xilla is the Sr. Entertainment Editor for GlobalGrind.com as well as CEO of the number 1 relationship blog BlogXilla.com/M2TB.com. He has been featured in XXL, The Source, Essence, LA Times and is considered one of the premiere bloggers in the industry. Follow him on twitter @BlogXilla
