Metro’s response to “shut your ho ass up and make some drums” has gone viral on TikTok.
Metro Boomin’s “BBL Drizzy” diss beat directed at Drake has gone viral on TikTok and everyone is getting in on the fun by remixing it.
The producer responsible for the beat behind the track that kicked off the war between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, “Like That,” decided to join the sparring rappers by dropping his own sort of diss track with “BBL Drizzy” last week. The track samples comedian King Willonius’ AI-generated parody song of the same name, which Metro acknowledged in a tweet.
When the 30-year-old producer shared the beat on SoundCloud, he also made a proposal. “Best verse over this gets a free beat just upload your song and hashtag #bbldrizzybeatgiveaway,” he tweeted, later adding that the winner will also get $10,000 and a runner-up will get a beat. The song, which references Rick Ross’ nickname for the Toronto rapper, alludes to the allegation Drake got cosmetic surgery on his abs.
Following the release of the beat, it’s been blowing up on TikTok and other social media platforms thanks to its catchy nature and the litany of remixes coming through. We’ve got everything from rapped verses on the beat, to someone adding a saxophone solo to the instrumental.
It’s hard to define “absolute victory” in something as subjective as a rap battle, but landing a No. 1 single with a diss song has to be pretty close. With his monstrous Drake disses “Euphoria” and “Not Like Us” doing historic streaming numbers, Kendrick Lamar will likely add the accomplishment to his accolades when the Billboard Hot 100 chart is updated next week. Outdoing Drake on his own turf would be a fitting punctuation for a contest that’s seen Kendrick turn the Toronto rapper’s customary weapons of internet savvy, infectious hit-making and strategic release tactics against him. In repurposing Drizzy’s tools, Kendrick bested Drake at his own game; he beat Drake by being Drake.
Kendrick kicked things off by reimagining Drizzy’s famous quick-release barrage into an even more potent product. During the Meek Mill, Drake war of 2015, Drizzy dropped his first diss, “Charged Up,” only to spin the block and unload the far superior “Back to Back” four days later. The move left Meek shell shocked. Kendrick’s variation began with “Euphoria,” a freeform Drizzy diss he dropped on an unceremonious Tuesday morning. Amid a flurry of quippy insults, Kendrick teased his subsequent back-to-back release. Riffing on Drake’s timestamp series, he followed up with “6:16 in LA,” a pensive, yet stylish Friday morning drop that oscillates between warning shot and condescending advice. To be sure, the double-play was a moment. But it was also a Trojan Horse.
That same night, Drake fired what should have been a kill shot, “Family Matters.” The shapeshifting diss track was an incisive barrage of quips aimed at The Weeknd, Rick Ross, Metro Boomin, ASAP Rocky and Kendrick himself. In it, he accuses K.Dot of physically abusing his wife. It’s an accusation that’s as weighty as it is unsubstantiated (for now), and the song itself quickly became a trending topic. But Kendrick quickly delivered a counterstrike with “Meet the Grahams” less than 40 minutes later. Laced with a grim Alchemist beat, the track captured even more attention with the claim that Drake had a hidden 11-year-old daughter. The move effectively swallowed Drake’s momentum. It was a character decapitation via surprise attack — think Afro Samurai’s dad getting his head lopped off with Justice’s hidden third arm.
Pushing Drake’s back-to-back strategy to even wilder extremes, Kendrick came back with “Not Like Us,” a bouncy, Mustard-produced bop that both expanded on the tactic and opened the door to another one: framing your diss track as a banger. Speaking to XXL in 2013, Drizzy described the virtue of creating a diss song that was also an inescapable hit, saying that it’s “more painful than anything” for the loser. He did it to Common in 2012 with his verse on Ross’ “Stay Schemin,” and, by 2015, he would also do it to Meek with “Back to Back.” You have to think he’s having a mean case of deja vu following the release of “Not Like Us.” Laced with West Coast bounce, indelible one-liners and an anthemic hook, “Not Like Us” is an early contender for Song of the Summer, alongside the song that launched this beef, Future and Metro’s “Like That.”
Beyond the obvious club-ready elements, “Not Like Us” also embodies the social media-centrism of modern times. Drake famously used his 2015 OVO Fest to post Meek Mill memes on-screen and get laughs from the audience. Kendrick is ostensibly extremely offline, but much of “Not Like Us” feels designed for virality. The beat itself is fit for krumping, and Kendrick stretches his vocals to accentuate his one-liners in a way that makes them ideal TikTok and Twitter fodder. “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor,” Kendrick raps, turning his elongated syllable into a wink. It’s all a subtle way of repurposing Drake’s time-tested songwriting tools. (That line is a cousin of a Drizzy’s lesbian pun from “Every Girl.”) Substitute the “Toosie Slide” dance for Crip-walking TikToks. Drake had people in the club screaming about Twitter fingers; Kendrick will have them shouting pedophilia accusations.
Kendrick’s stratagems go beyond song construction, too. He usually dropped during Akademiks livestreams, with the presumed goal of being able to capture Ak’s exaggerated looks of disappointment. The subsequent reactions go viral, which only fortifies the Kung-Fu Kenny hype machine. Kendrick also took off the copyright strikes from reaction videos so creators can make money. It’s an indirect, altruistic form of profit-sharing and another way to beat Drake, who once gave away $1 million to random strangers during the “God’s Plan” video.
Now celebrating its 28th year, the American Black Film Festival remains the preeminent event of its kind, empowering Black artists and spotlighting a diverse array of entertainment content created by and for individuals of African descent. An event like no other, the festival brings together enthusiasts of Black culture alongside industry executives and content creators from across the globe for five days filled with screenings, engaging talk events, exclusive parties, and invaluable networking opportunities.
Join us live in sunny South Beach from June 12-16 for an unforgettable experience, followed by our online segment streaming on ABFF PLAY from June 17-24.
ABFF SINCE 1997
Our Legacy
The ABFF has earned global acclaim for its profound impact on the entertainment industry. Over the span of nearly three decades, the festival has served as a vital platform for Black artists, offering them pathways to success within Hollywood and beyond.
Through an array of talent showcases ad pipelines programs, the ABFF has provided unparalleled support to countless actors, writers, and directors, guiding their careers and introducing them to the broader industry landscape, often when they were still relatively unknown. As a result, the festival stands as a beacon of opportunity, empowering diverse voices and reshaping the narrative of representation in film and television.
Portable power station capacity: Enter the capacity of your portable power station, in watt-hours (Wh). This is typically indicated on the label or specifications sheet for your power station.
Device wattage: Enter the wattage rating of the device that you want to power with your portable power station. This information can usually be found on the device itself or in the user manual.
Outputs:
Hours of operation: This is the estimated number of hours that your portable power station can power your device, based on its wattage rating and the power station’s capacity. It is calculated by dividing the power station capacity by the device wattage.
Recharge time: This is the estimated time it will take to recharge your portable power station, based on its capacity and the charging speed of your charger. It is calculated by dividing the power station capacity by the charging speed of your charger.
Here is an example of how to use the portable power station calculator:
Suppose you have a portable power station with a capacity of 1000Wh, and you want to use it to power a laptop with a wattage rating of 60W. Using the calculator, you would enter 1000 for the power station capacity and 60 for the device wattage. The calculator would then display the following results:
Hours of operation: 16.7
Recharge time: 16.7 hours
This indicates that your portable power station will be able to power your laptop for an estimated 16.7 hours, and it will take approximately 16.7 hours to recharge the power station from empty.
Keep in mind that these calculations are only estimates and may not be accurate for your specific situation. The actual power output and recharge time of a portable power station can vary depending on factors such as the efficiency of the power station, the charging speed of your charger, and the power consumption of your devices. It’s always a good idea to consult with the manufacturer or a professional to get a more accurate assessment of your portable power station’s capabilities. ttps://renewableoutdoors.com/pages/how-to-calculate-the-power-output-and-recharge-time-of-a-portable-power-station
BY WESLEY LOWERY ILLUSTRATION BY AARON MARIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY CALEB SANTIAGO ALVARADO
THE OPIOID CRISIS ISN’T ONLY A WHITE, RURAL, OR SUBURBAN PROBLEM. BLACK MEN ARE DYING IN RECORD NUMBERS AT A WAY HIGHER RATE THAN OTHER GROUPS. MH INVESTIGATES FROM THE FRONT LINES.
NINE MEN, ALL OF THEM BLACK, gathered at Gateway to Change in early May, when I first visited the gray-and-tan-painted drug-treatment center that is planted next to a bustling corner grocery store on the north side of Milwaukee. Much of their talk was about a man who was no longer there and whose fate could be any of theirs. Michael C. Williams had been born in South Bend, Indiana, before moving here as a child. When times were good, he worked as a home health aide. But he also, for years, battled drug and alcohol addiction that ultimately contributed to a number of criminal charges, a few stints in jail, and two stays at Gateway’s rehab program. The first was back in 2010, when, in his late 20s, Williams and his fiancée, Penny, came to Gateway fighting cocaine addiction. They spent several months in counseling and were seemingly doing well—until they weren’t. When Penny overdosed in 2019, it was Williams who found her dead in a motel room.
Williams showed back up at Gateway at the end of 2021, in his late 30s and clearly still grieving Penny’s death—as well as that of his mother, who died last June—even as he worked to process the depth of his dependence. By all accounts, his second stay was far less successful than the first: Williams left after two weeks without completing the program. A few days before Easter, Williams’s sister found him shirtless and unresponsive on the cold basement floor, next to her teenage son’s bed and the Xbox they’d both played that night. Paramedics discovered a glass crack pipe near Williams’s body. When word made it back to Gateway, the men were not only heartbroken but scared. They knew that what happened to him wasn’t just a simple overdose—and that it could come for them next.
“When someone dies of an overdose, you’re like, Wow, I was probably using the same drugs, and I didn’t die,” DeWayne Dinkins, a 55-year-old patient, tells me as he shifts restlessly in a zip-up hoodie and jeans that hang off his gaunt frame. “I just cringe. To die of some dope? And his family will be like, ‘Wow, he never got it together.’ I don’t want that to be my story.” Milwaukee and many other metropolises are now on the front lines of a raging overdose crisis the CDC estimates is killing roughly 100,000 Americans a year—about 11 every hour. And its body count has steadily increased over the past decade. In 2021, Milwaukee County had more fatal drug overdoses—644 of them—than in any other year on record, and this year is projected to be even worse. By the end of September, the tally had reached 405 confirmed overdoses already, with an additional 138 suspected overdoses pending final toxicology reports.
These mounting deaths are driven largely by synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, a very powerful pain drug that now contaminates much of the nation’s street supply of cocaine, meth, and heroin and that has fundamentally altered the face of the opioid epidemic. Although this epidemic was once considered a crisis of rural and suburban white people, the most vulnerable are now Black inner-city populations, whose death rates have skyrocketed.
By now you’ve undoubtedly heard of fentanyl—shipments of it are frequently seized at the border, police officers nationwide were convinced that even touching it would risk an accidental overdose (it will not), and it’s been tied to a number of celebrity deaths. The musician Prince died after taking a black-market opioid pain pill that he thought was hydrocodone but contained fentanyl. The rapper Mac Miller died after snorting counterfeit and fentanyl-laced oxycodone pills. The actor Michael K. Williams was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment with a mixture of cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl in his system. What these stories overshadow, however, is just how devastatingly mundane similar overdoses have become among Black Americans every day. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center declared that Black men as a group were the hardest hit in the recent surge of drug-overdose deaths. In Philadelphia, researchers at Penn Medicine found that during the city’s stay-at-home order in 2020, the nonfatal-opioid-overdose rate had fallen by 31 percent for white people but increased by 50 percent for Black people. And a recent CDC study found that although across 25 states and Washington, D. C., the pandemic had caused spikes in overdose-death rates for all racial groups, the spike in Black overdoses was the largest. Here in Milwaukee County, where Black residents make up about 28 percent of the population, both the number of fatal overdoses and the percentage of those with Black victims have risen sharply. In 2015, the region had just 255 fatal-overdose victims, 60 of whom were Black (about 24 percent). As the deaths reached a new high in 2021, Black residents accounted for 37 percent of all casualties—a growing rate that had climbed to 39 percent by the end of this summer.
“African Americans are now outpacing whites as far as opioid-involved overdose deaths,” says Adam Milam, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of anesthesiology at Mayo Clinic who studies this broader surge. Dr. Milam has also found that Black victims may have previously been undercounted because their deaths were wrongly classified as being due to another drug. It was inevitable that the opioid epidemic would one day come for Black people and that when it did, things would be dire. As public-health experts note, Black Americans are less likely to have access to quality medical care and primary-care physicians. Studies have shown that they’re consistently undertreated for pain, which may make them more likely to turn to street drugs. And they’re more likely to live in neighborhoods with limited access to detox and drug-treatment centers. There’s a reason that the once-in-a-century health crisis that was the Covid pandemic hit America’s Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities the hardest. As the saying goes: When America gets a cold, Black America gets pneumonia. Now that this illness has arrived, the task of treating it falls on providers like Gateway, a self-run for-profit treatment and rehabilitation center. Almost all of Gateway’s clients are people who don’t fit neatly into the stories we’ve been telling ourselves, and that we’ve been told, about the opioid epidemic. They are inner-city street-drug users who’ve spent years using cocaine and heroin and who now pray that they avoid the fate of friends like Michael C. Williams, whose funeral service was held the week before my first visit.
The sad fact is that no one from Gateway attended Williams’s funeral. “I’m real picky over funerals that I do attend,” Desilynn Smith, L.P.C., Gateway’s clinical director and supervisor, tells me as she sits in a small back office overflowing with self-help pamphlets. Smith, 53, shakes her head full of licorice-red braids and explains that when you’re this close to the crisis, it’s possible to spend every weekend bouncing between local funeral homes and cemeteries. “It still rouses a lot of emotions,” she says. “The funerals become too unbearable.”
AN ADDICTION SPECIALIST I know compares America’s never-ending drug crisis to a massive bridge with tons of holes in the asphalt. In this metaphor, we all live on that bridge. Each time someone becomes addicted, they fall through one of the holes and into a raging river below.
The wise thing for us to do would be to repair all of the holes: In this case, that would mean the hard work of resetting a culture that glorifies drug use and addiction, especially alcoholism; reining in the drug and alcohol companies that feed our population a steady stream of poisons designed to be progressively more potent; and investing in both the health-care infrastructure needed to fully service all of our addicted and the types of expansive social programs that could help prevent or at least remedy the traumas that drive people to drugs in the first place. Instead we hire lifeguards and instruct them to rescue as many of the flailing people as they can. Oh, and the committee overseeing the lifeguards is racist, convinced that the more melanin a person has in their skin, the more it’s their own fault that they are unable to swim. As a result, scores of our most vulnerable are left to drown, their only hope of rescue resting with an underequipped team of volunteers who, having made it out of the water themselves, jumped back in to try to pull as many others as they can safely to shore.
That was Glenda Hampton’s aim when, about three years into her own recovery, she opened Gateway in 2003. “I felt it was my purpose to give back,” says Hampton, now 68. “I figured I can help somebody.” In the years since, thousands of people, mostly poor Black natives of the surrounding North Milwaukee neighborhoods, have cycled through. Gateway is not technically an inpatient residential facility. It’s a treatment center with a housing option. People come to Gateway after they’re done being treated for any acute medical complications created by their addiction, after they’ve detoxed—typically at a hospital, emergency room, or inpatient detox center—and once they’re ready to begin counseling and therapeutic programming. It’s not unheard of, though, for someone to show up, start having symptoms of drug withdrawal, and have to be sent elsewhere until they are well enough to continue.
At any given point, there are 30 to 40 people, men and women, living here. Most come expecting to stay between one and three months, but if someone in recovery has difficulty finding housing, the center will let them stay longer. In some cases, people have stayed more than a year. The administrative costs and programming expenses are invoiced to patients’ health insurance. Those boarding at Gateway are supposed to pay a $300 monthly stipend, but the center doesn’t turn anyone away. Many of those living here aren’t really paying anything.
The walls of the main conference room are full of inspirational quotes and guidelines for living a healthier life, and there’s a massive mural depicting the neighborhood surrounding Gateway. Group talk sessions run every weekday—usually from 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M.—and are encouraged for everyone who is living here full-time. They’re often led by Lawton “Mr. L.” Merritt, a tall and impeccably dressed man—on the first day I was there, he wore a brown three-piece suit with monogrammed shirtsleeves—who is a substance-abuse counselor in training at Gateway. Merritt spent decades involved with gangs, selling drugs and serving a stint in federal prison, before devoting his life to community work, and he understands exactly how infectious the problem has become. “Right around the corner is the dope houses,” he tells me. “So this is the perfect location, where there is a great need.”
Much of the program is based on 12-step addiction treatment. Besides providing a place to stay, intensive therapy, and counseling, Gateway helps those it treats locate steady employment and housing. The aim is to supply the support structure necessary to break addiction, although for the population that Gateway serves—men and women who are less likely to have family members they can lean on or safe housing away from temptation—it’s a difficult task. Merritt explains that each person here is sorted into one of four phases—those in phase 1 are largely confined to the treatment center, while those in phase 2 have less structure and more freedom of movement, leaving to hunt for jobs or attend community meetings.
The daily sessions consist of check-ins during which each person goes over their feelings about where they are on the journey; what, if any, cravings they’re having; and what they think of the most recent readings and reflections. Each day is guided by a catechism called “just for today”—a lesson or theme that frames the discussion. Today’s, written in red marker on a well-worn whiteboard at the front of the room, is “Just for today: I am willing to go to any lengths to stay clean. I will become as open-minded and ready to take direction as I need to be.”
But the conversation quickly shifts once the men realize I’ve come here, in part, to ask them about fentanyl. In a room of longtime users, all of them poor Black men, they all say they are horrified that they will die after accidentally consuming fentanyl. When I ask how many of them knew someone personally who died after accidentally overdosing, each raises his hand and makes a point to note that he personally watched someone die after getting hold of drugs that had been laced with fentanyl.
WHEN I ASK HOW MANY OF THEM KNEW SOMEONE PERSONALLY WHO DIED AFTER ACCIDENTALLY OVERDOSING, EACH RAISES HIS HAND AND MAKES A POINT TO NOTE THAT HE PERSONALLY WATCHED SOMEONE DIE.
At one point, DeWayne Dinkins gets up from a chair in the back corner of the room and walks up to where a 2017 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about fentanyl has been clipped, laminated, and taped to the wall. “ ‘fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opiate similar to heroin, was found in ten recent drug-related deaths in Milwaukee County,’ ” he reads aloud to the room. “ ‘The substance is an analog, or variation, of fentanyl that can be legally prescribed by a doctor but can be 40 or 50 times more powerful than heroin and can be extremely deadly.’
“Fentanyl ran me back in here,” Dinkins continues, addressing the others. “I had turned into a bum, had lost my apartment. I was doing stupid stuff. I just had a death wish on me . . . and I was ready for a change and had just lost six and a half years of being clean.”
Dinkins has lived a life similar to those of most of the men being served at Gateway and in inner-city treatment centers across the country. His parents were among the waves of poor Black men and women who made their way here from the South in the mid-20th century, forced to make homes in a cluster of underserved neighborhoods in what was then, as it is now, a city largely segregated by race. His father, Albert Jackson, spent his days driving buses and cabs and his days off gambling and shooting pool with a neighborhood crew.
All told, it was a solid childhood, until 1974, when, at age seven, three days before Christmas, Dinkins remembers his uncle running into the house and shouting that Jackson had been killed at a local bar. “I’m going to kill who killed my daddy,” he recalls declaring out loud before his family members grabbed him to stop him from running out the front door. “My childhood days came to an end,” he tells me.
By 13 he’d been kicked out of school and was sent off to Ethan Allen School, a now shuttered institution for delinquent boys where many of the poor Black men at Gateway once spent at least some time. When he was released, at 18, Dinkins started selling—dime bags of powder—in the neighborhood. He never drank, having seen how his family behaved when they got too drunk. Initially he didn’t use the stuff he sold, either. Then, one night, as they all gambled, someone called him a square. To prove he wasn’t, he laced his weed with a little powder. It was 1985. “I’ve been running after that stuff ever since,” he says. The next three decades were a never-ending cycle of drugs and incarceration. He did two years on a three-year sentence for felony theft after being caught snatching a purse. Not long after his release, he caught another bid—three years on a five after being convicted of sticking up a pizza-delivery man. “Each robbery I was doing I was either high or I was thinking about my father,” he recalls. “It seemed like every December that rolled around I got in trouble.” When he wasn’t being caught committing fresh crimes, he was getting sent back to prison for parole violations—he couldn’t keep his urine clean enough to pass a drug test. As I listen to Dinkins and the other men at Gateway, it’s hard not to think of how the deck has been stacked against them since even before they were born—a population of people whose own choices unquestionably contributed to their peril yet who were never presented any good options to begin with.
Dinkins first came to Gateway in 2010. He stayed for 60 days and got clean for the first time in his adulthood. He married a woman he’d met at church, and things seemed to be going pretty well. But after nine months, he relapsed. He’d won some dope while gambling and, after a fight with his wife, decided to smoke it. He went back to Gateway and got clean again and this time stayed sober for three years. He relapsed again. For two years, he used regularly as his marriage crumbled. Finally, in 2015, he returned to Gateway, where, at 47, he was served with divorce papers and got sober for a third time. This time he lasted six and a half years before he fell back through the hole. He was going through a breakup, working odd jobs and racking up gambling debts, and dealing with the various medical complications that had resulted from decades of abusing his body. By the time I meet Dinkins, he’s been back at Gateway for six months, having checked himself in after an eight-month binge that culminated with watching a close friend overdose, seemingly die, and then come back to life. Dinkins remembers desperately dragging his friend to the bathtub, splashing cold water on his face when his eyes had rolled back and his body had gone stiff after smoking crack that he guesses had been cut with fentanyl. For more than ten minutes, he wondered whether it was already too late and if he should abandon his friend. “That should have been enough for me to stop then and there,” Dinkins says. “But it wasn’t.” When his friend’s eyes finally opened and he came back, Dinkins went into the other room and finished the drugs that he still had left.
MOST OF THE PEOPLE who cycle through Gateway are, like Dinkins, users with high “relapse potential,” says Smith, the clinical director. No one is surprised that these men and women go through the program multiple times. Knowing what she knows about how addiction works, especially among a North Milwaukee population with little access to jobs, health care, and stable housing, Smith expects it. The biggest hurdle is getting over the stigma of having relapsed. “I don’t want nobody to look at me different,” Smith has been told when she asks repeat patients why they didn’t come back to Gateway sooner. “I don’t want them to think I was weak.”
Like so many lifeguards, Smith learned to swim after being unceremoniously tossed in the deep end. Her then-15-year-old son had gotten hold of some laced weed, prompting a psychotic episode. Soon she had to navigate the legal and mental-health systems to advocate on his behalf. Each time she encountered a bureaucratic obstacle or new evidence of the ways these systems were constructed not to help but to obstruct, Smith grew even more determined to do something about it. Ultimately she became a clinical substance-abuse counselor.
By the time she took a job at Gateway in 2010, synthetic opioids had prompted a deadly new era of American addiction. Pharmaceutical companies were producing high-powered painkillers like OxyContin in bulk, while illicit “pill mills” were popping up across the country. Attempts to crack down on rampant prescriptions sent street-drug prices soaring, driving many users to heroin in order to get their fix. But almost no one coming into Gateway back then had taken opioids. “It really wasn’t what they would consider a Black people’s drug,” Smith says.
After hearing over and over again about the carnage unleashed by opioids—many of the health-care providers in Wisconsin were then debating the wisdom of methadone—she wanted to see for herself how it worked. She took a job at a methadone clinic, where she witnessed opioid addiction in person for the first time. It was unlike anything she’d seen up until that point. When the final rankings are assembled, it’s unlikely there will have been any individual of our era responsible for inflicting more pain on as many Black Americans than the nameless devil who first decided to mix fentanyl into street drugs. By the time Smith returned to Gateway a few years later, the men and women cycling through the center had begun sharing horror stories of chance encounters with fentanyl and in many cases were checking themselves in for the explicit purpose of getting clean before they ended up accidentally consuming it.
Smith began attending community health meetings and seminars to learn everything she could about opioids and convinced the owners of Young’s, the often overflowing corner bar she’d started sneaking to at 16 and where many of her patients were known commodities, to install a Narcan box.
For several years, she had an amazing ally. Shortly after she left Gateway to work in the methadone clinic, Smith wrote a letter to Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar, her childhood sweetheart and the father of her oldest son, who by then had been incarcerated for years, convicted of a series of violent crimes. It turned out that as Smith dived further into her work as an addiction counselor and mental-health advocate, Abd-Al-Jabbar had fallen deep into depression and despair. Hoping to breathe some hope into his spirit, she told Abd-Al-Jabbar about his positive impact on her in the decades their lives had been entwined. By 2016, they were back together, and when Abd-Al-Jabbar was released from prison for the final time, in July 2018, having spent more than 27 years behind bars, he and Smith got married. He joined her as one of the lifeguards, finding a job at 414Life, a community program run by the Milwaukee Health Department’s Office of Violence Prevention. The program sends locals who have served time into their neighborhoods to help provide resources and support to the people considered more likely to be the victims and perpetrators of violence.
Eventually, however, the weight of his job began to feel too heavy, she says. Smith noticed that her husband was becoming more withdrawn, skipping work events and cutting corners. He told her he’d been having flashbacks. He kept thinking about the families that he had hurt over the years—his first prison stint had been for homicide. One day, he was called to respond to the scene of a grisly double homicide—involving a mother and her child—and couldn’t stop having nightmares. Smith went with her husband to counseling, but Abd-Al-Jabbar wasn’t ready to admit that he was using again. He didn’t want to tell any of his coworkers about his struggles. “They are going to think that I can’t do my job,” she remembers him telling her. Sometime during the day on February 10, 2021, Smith called her husband, but he didn’t pick up. When he rang her back two hours later, it was clear he was high. “His mouth sounded like he had cotton in it,” Smith recalls. Later that day, when Abd-Al-Jabbar didn’t pick up their grandson, Smith called around and was told her husband was asleep at his sister’s house. He never came home that night, and so Smith called back early the next morning but could not reach him. She was leading one of Gateway’s group counseling sessions when she got a series of texts insisting she go to her sister-in-law’s place immediately. Minutes earlier, two of his nephews had kicked down a locked bedroom door and found Abd-Al-Jabbar unresponsive. When Smith got there and saw an ambulance, she assumed something must have happened to her husband’s mother. “It’s Hamid,” she was told by his sister. “He passed away.” All Smith could muster in response to the news was a tearful “I’m sorry,” convinced that there was something more she should have done.
Toxicology would later conclude that the 51-year-old had overdosed and identified cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl in his system. And so the woman doing as much as anyone in Milwaukee to combat the overdose crisis was burying her own husband due to an overdose. She stayed away from Gateway for about two months, and when she returned she at times struggled to correctly calibrate her emotions. “I just wanted to go shake some of the people and tell them that this is real,” she says. “I don’t want to lose another person.”
AS THE FACE of the opioid epidemic continues to change, doctors, researchers, and frontline service providers fear that our collective response will change with it. “You’ve got this perfect storm and a real change in the tone of the discussion about addiction,” says Stephen M. Taylor, M.D., M.P.H., a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction and has studied the impact of the opioid epidemic on Black Americans. “The problem, of course, is that the Black community was largely left out of this discussion.” Kassandra Frederique, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit working to decriminalize drug use, says that part of the problem is America’s historic and continually racist “empathy fatigue” when dealing with systemic problems that affect minorities. “The pathology associated with Indigenous people or communities of color, or with Black folks, is ‘They can’t get their stuff together; therefore we need more consequences,’ ” she says.
This is the point in the article where I’m supposed to offer a glimmer of hope—a pivot to just enough of the positive that you can set down this magazine convinced that someone else has everything handled, freed of the burden of feeling that you actually need to do anything about the horrible things you’ve just read about. Don’t worry, I’ll uphold my end of the deal. You’ve read this far. But first you’ve got to grit through one more gut punch. Hope so often springs from horror, after all. Resilience can exist only because of the hardship by which it was conceived.
About two weeks had passed after my first visit to Gateway when one of the men in treatment I had met, Rodney Hill, 62, got an urgent phone call. Hill, who favors button-up shirts, a flat-brimmed hat, and New Balance sneakers, had been there since March, after being kicked out of the home where he’d been living and witnessing one too many fentanyl overdoses. “It’s scary. I’m not trying to do that,” he’d told me at one point, speaking slowly with a bit of a drawl. Now, two months after Hill’s arrival at Gateway, his brother was on the phone insisting that he call his daughter. Whatever this was, Hill immediately knew, it was not gonna be good. When he reached his daughter, he was informed his five-year-old great-grandson, Kayden, was dead. The boy’s mother, Hill’s 24-year-old granddaughter, was facing criminal charges in connection with his death.
On the afternoon of May 11, Kayden had lain down for a nap after returning home from school. Hours passed before his mother realized he was still sleeping and went to wake him. Kayden wasn’t breathing, and his lips had turned blue. “All I can do is just pray for his soul,” Hill tells me. The boy’s mother would later admit to police that her boyfriend, a small-time dealer, had been packaging drugs on the kitchen counter earlier that day. In the trash, police found the tin foil that he’d used to mix this stash. When they tested it, it was positive for traces of fentanyl.
INSTEAD OF “FENTANYL OVERDOSE,” SOME FRONTLINE SERVICE PROVIDERS HAVE SWITCHED TO “FENTANYL POISONING,” IN HOPES THAT MORE-PRECISE TERMINOLOGY WILL HELP PEOPLE BETTER UNDERSTAND THIS NEW CHAPTER IN THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC.
Of course, Hill hadn’t even heard of fentanyl when he started smoking and selling weed around 14 and before long was lacing his cigarettes with powder. Or when one day, a friend handed him a crack pipe, and that night he burned the $2,000 in drug earnings he had in his pocket on dope, going on to spend the next 40 years fruitlessly chasing the feeling of that first high. But as with Michael C. Williams’s death, Kayden’s underscored the dangers of addiction. When I visit Gateway again in August, Hill has been living at the center for five months. Initially he’d assumed that he’d be here for a shorter stay, maybe 90 days total. Now he wants to take his time to make sure he’s really ready before leaving.
“There’s five of us in a room,” he says with a laugh as he takes me on a tour through his second-floor suite—three conjoined rooms that have five beds, two TVs, a few dressers, and a kitchenette between them. He plans to stay here until he can find a consistent job driving trucks and reliable housing where he won’t have to live around people still using drugs. “Do not press your luck,” he says he advises his former friends who are using. “You’re playing Russian roulette with your life with that fentanyl.” As Hill and I make our way back down toward the front desk, I see Dinkins, too, who is continuing his daily lessons and not planning to leave until he feels absolutely ready. Finally, we find Smith, who tells me that in the first nine months of the year, Gateway has seen 11 people leave. Six of them did not complete the program. The other five ended up coming back to try again. Although one former resident died of Covid, Smith doesn’t know of anyone since Williams who has fatally overdosed so far this year.
She’s upbeat, even as she mentions in passing that, about a month earlier, one of her aunts died of an overdose. She later corrects herself: Instead of the term “fentanyl overdose,” she and other frontline service providers have switched to “fentanyl poisoning,” in hopes that more-precise terminology will help people better understand this new chapter in the opioid epidemic. “Early on, I learned that their success is not my success, and their failure is not mine,” she tells me as she locks up for the night. She reminds me that the key to this work is remembering to focus on pulling people from the rapids one at a time and not becoming overwhelmed by the countless more still thrashing in the waves. “Sometimes it becomes discouraging. But I remind myself that I’m not here to save the world.”
The holidays are usually a great time to pick up some extra cash with seasonal work. But, this year it seems like workers aren’t that interested in the jobs and small business owners are worried.
Findings from a new report from an Incfile survey revealed about 34% of respondents said that it is harder to find help this year compared to years prior.
The report covered data across a myriad of business-related topics and delved into scenarios founders said were most important to them. The biggest concern founders was boosting sales this holiday season, with 39% sharing it’s their main cause of stress. Namely, securing goods within budget (22%) and hiring good help (24%).
These findings are surprising as inflation has driven the cost of nearly everything way up, with the current US rate sitting at around 9%. According to the Labor Department there are about 10.7 million open jobs, which is a slight uptick from last year’s 10.4 million. Of those, the seasonal positions are slow to be filled. “I’ve never seen a market like this,” said Matt Lavery, UPS’s global director of sourcing and recruiting in a 2021 interview with The Christian Science Monitor. Nearly a year later, the employment situation is nearly the same despite ballooning inflation. “Normally when you’re talking about people coming off unemployment benefits, you see surges in candidates. We’re not seeing those.” Economists blame the lag on the residual effects of the Great Resignation that’s spanned the last two years whereby workers were quitting their jobs at staggering rates for roles they found more fitting. The workforce movement has since forced employers to sweeten their benefits packages for employees to keep them within the company, including work-life balance measures.
According to Incfile, 80% of employers are also giving back to their employees, offering time off to spend with their families this holiday season.
“The holiday season is one of the busiest and most exciting times of year for small business owners,” said Dustin Ray, Chief Growth Officer & Co-CEO, Incfile. “It’s encouraging to hear, as the holiday season gets underway, that 87% of small business owners feel supported by their community. It’s been a difficult couple of years, and to have a strong sense of community is a key pillar for small business owners to realize success.”
With the new year approaching (new year, better me), you may be assessing your long-term relationship, and what you find could leave you wondering if it’s time for the B word: a breakup. Ending a relationship sucks. There is no way to get around that feeling. But is reframing a breakup a valuable tool in the grieving process? When we say reframe, we mean taking a page out of actress and producer Tia Mowry’s book.
During a recent interview on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna, Mowry, who announced her breakup from husband Cory Hardrict after 14 years of marriage, offered what many are citing as a positively refreshing view on the ending of her relationship, calling it a graduation.
“I look at it as like a curriculum when you’re in college or high school,” she tells the two hosts. “You’re learning. You’re growing. You’re evolving. You’re creating. I was able to create with Cory some beautiful, amazing children. At the end of that curriculum, there’s a graduation. There’s a celebration. So that’s basically how I’m looking at it now.” She also shared there was a moment when she knew it was time to make a change. But how do you know when a relationship is really over?
Well, it’s not just as simple as having conflict in your relationship as Dr. Antionette Edmonds, a licensed therapist and mental health influencer on TikTok boosting 164,000 followers, tells ESSENCE, “Conflict is almost inevitable in relationships.” She says, “conflict and disagreements are also healthy. It’s ultimately one way to learn more about your partner’s wants and needs and how to improve to be a better version of yourself in your relationship. However, if the conflict and disagreement reoccur, it may be time to revisit what’s the underlying cause.” With that little tidbit, we’ll dive deeper into the indicators it’s time to exit a relationship.
The Spark is Blown Out There is quite a bit of competing info swirling around the internet and social media about whether a spark is necessary for a relationship to thrive. However, in discerning whether or not one is over, theburnout of a sparkcould be a vital tell-tell sign. “The first sign that your relationship is over indeed is when the spark is gone,” Dr. Tiara Watford, LCSW, BCTMH, therapist, and founder of Inspired to Grow, tells us
“Many people tend to ignore this sign due to having hopes and desires that the relationship can be saved,” Watford shares. But when you, for example, no longer enjoy spending your free time engaging with your partner and aren’t getting a dopamine boost from their texts and calls, that’s not a good cue. “Other signs that may indicate that your relationship is over is when you start to have interest in other people,” she notes. “That shows that you’re no longer interested.”
Communication Just Isn’t There The saying communication is key isn’t a cliché. It’s the absolute truth. And here’s why. “As a licensed therapist who works with couples, I see a few emerging themes when working with couples on the brink of a breakup,” Edmonds shares. The top two themes: are a lack of emotional connection and a communication breakdown. She says these grievances are often expressed with statements like, “I feel like we are growing apart or something feels off.” “Other clues that may appear when the relationship is over are when the relationship is becoming more harmful and not enjoyable. Or if you find yourself in a place where you can’t be honest with your partner.” She also says when a partner starts to exclude from happenings in their life or isn’t showing any interest, it’s time to reassess the relationship.
The Trust is Gone Trust is another nonnegotiable relationship pillar; we’re not just discussing infidelity. “As a couples therapist, I’ve witnessed couples recover from a lot of things, including infidelity, financial issues, and life transitions,” Edmonds shares. But she says one thing separates couples that make it from those who don’t:their commitment and trust in one another and the relationship. “I tell clients that it’s easier to be with someone you trust versus someone you love because you can always love the person you trust, but you can’t always trust the person you love.” Whoa. Felt that. She also notes getting curious and asking yourself questions are essential. There are many ways to breach trust in a relationship, not just infidelity. Can you feel safe with your partner? Do they respect your boundaries? “These are just examples of the importance of trust in a relationship because trust means different things to people in relationships.”
You’re Staying Only Because You’re Afraid to Start Over Have you ever stayed in a relationship long past its expiration date because you were afraid to start over? You’re not alone. “People stay in relationships that are over to avoid dealing with the acute pain when, in actuality, not ending the relationship is far more harmful to both individuals,” says Edmonds. And if you’re in a relationship with external factors like financial ties and children, she says ending things is much more layered. But, she says to ask yourself: If those external factors didn’t exist, would you still choose to leave?” If the answer is “yes,” it’s time to go.
“Pain is inevitable, but the feeling is temporary,” she tells us. “Accepting the relationship is over can sometimes be the most challenging part. But you must process, prepare for it, and then take the necessary steps to end the relationship. I tell couples that if they know their relationship is ending, but both avoid ending things, try counseling together,” she continues. Now, she says counseling isn’t necessarily going to fix the relationship, but it offers a safe environment for both people to process and gracefully part ways. “Ending a need for a relationship doesn’t necessarily have to be this daunting task when done amicably.”
The Sundance Film Festival returns January 19 through 29 with a slate of independent features from filmmakers worldwide. The 2023 festival features selections picked from a record-breaking 4,061 submissions. The chosen few include documentaries and dramas from Black creators, examining figures, stories, and slices of life that speak to the unique experiences of members of the Black diaspora. The films will be on view in person in Park City, Salt Lake City, and the Sundance Resort starting on Jan 19, with a selection of films available online across the country from January 24 through the 29th.
From documentaries about legendary culture definers like Little Richard, and Nikki Giovanni, to dramas centering on generational trauma and healing, immigrant experiences, and twists of supernatural horror, the robust offerings from Black directors, producers, and stars are sure to shape the box office and awards noms of 2023.
Take a look at a few of the selections from Black creators highlighted at the festival below:
Young. Wild. Free. Starring Algee Smith, Sanaa Lathan, Sierra Capri, and Mike Epps, this one finds High school senior Brandon drowning in responsibilities when his world is turned upside down…after being robbed at gunpoint by the girl of his dreams.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
From director and screenwriter Raven Jackson and produced by Barry Jenkins, this decades-spanning exploration of a woman’s life in Mississippi is an ode to the generations of people, places, and ineffable moments that shape us. Starring Moses Ingram.
Little Richard: I Am Everything This documentary celebrates the life and legacy of Little Richard, revealing the Black queer origins of rock ’n’ roll and finally exploding the whitewashed canon of American pop music. Through archival and performance footage, the revolutionary icon’s life unfurls onscreen – including all of its switchbacks and contradictions.
Talk To Me This supernatural thriller sees a group of friends discovering how to conjure spirits using an ancient embalmed hand. With the power to communicate with the other side in their grasp, they become hooked on the new thrill…until one of them goes too far and opens the door to the spirit world
It’s a lose-lose situation. While some streamers are losing money by paying to get content on their platforms, others are losing money by distributing it on their own platforms. The result? Price hikes.
Streaming services just keep creeping up in price. Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Apple TV Plus all announced price hikes this year, which means we’re forced to have to pay more money to keep up with the shows that are actually relevant, like Andor or Stranger Things.
The truth is, this trend isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Streaming services need to raise their prices or embrace advertising if they want to meet investors’ expectations. They’re just going to have to risk losing subscribers who don’t want to pay these jacked-up prices along the way.
Back in 2011, a standard Netflix subscription cost just $7.99 per month — $1 more than the ad-supported plan Netflix launched last week. The company introduced its $11.99 per month 4K premium subscription in 2013, and from there, things just got more expensive, with Netflix making $1 or $2 price increases across all its plans over the course of the next several years.
In 2017, Netflix’s most expensive plan jumped from $11.99 to $13.99, and its standard plan went from $9.99 to $10.99. At the time, the company attributed the hike to the addition of new exclusive content and features. But this obviously wasn’t the end of Netflix’s price increases: it went up once again in 2019, bringing the premium price to $15.99, the standard plan to $13.99, and raising the basic option for the first time to $8.99. Netflix raised the standard and premium plans by another $2 in 2020 and then cranked up the prices again earlier this year.
Netflix doesn’t cash in on licensing content out to other platforms
As streaming services dump more money into building a library of content, they aren’t benefiting so much from adding new subscribers as the streaming landscape continues to mature, and most people have locked themselves into the services of their choice. According to data analytics group Kantar, as of December 2021, 85 percent of households in the US were subscribed to a streaming service. This number only increased by 2 percent year over year, leaving little room for growth.
“Streaming TV is in its adolescence now,” Eric Schmitt, a research director and analyst at Gartner, tells The Verge. “The early days of the land grab are ending. We’re coming into a phase where the service providers need to demonstrate that they’ve got viable businesses to their investors.”
On top of that, services like Netflix don’t cash in on licensing content out to other platforms. Netflix’s original content is exclusive to its service and it pays to get the rights to other studios’ content on its platform. That’s why the service took action after it reported losing subscribers for the first time in over a decade in April and then lost millions more in the months that followed. The company has since rolled out an ad-supported tier and is planning to crack down on password sharing next year in a bid to diversify its source of revenue and squeeze existing subscribers. It also put a $17 billion cap on content spending set to last through 2023 and perhaps the new few years. Apple TV Plus is stuck in a similar situation as Netflix, as it only generates money from attracting subscribers — not by licensing out the content it spends money to create. Apple raised prices across all of its services last month, including Apple TV Plus, citing “an increase in licensing costs.” While the company hasn’t yet turned to advertising to help mitigate some of these expenses, it’s almost guaranteed that it will.
“I think ad-supported is an inevitable state for almost every service,” Schmitt says, noting that there’s a portion of viewers who will tolerate ads in order to get a lower subscription price. There have been a couple of rumors floating around about the possibility of Apple TV Plus incorporating ads, with a recent report from DigiDay indicating that Apple has been in talks with media agencies to bring commercials to the service. It’s also reportedly building an advertising network around its deal to stream Major League Soccer games, according to Bloomberg.
But even if a streaming service does generate some extra cash by licensing content to other platforms, this presents another problem that results in price hikes as well. Let’s take Disney, for example, which uses much of its own content to fill out Disney Plus and Hulu’s libraries.
Earlier this year, Disney took a $1 billion hit to end an unnamed licensing agreement early and get the content on its own platform. While Disney didn’t specify the content in question, some suspect it had to do with the company reacquiring the Marvel shows Netflix produced in the mid-2010s, like Jessica Jones and Daredevil, which now reside on Disney Plus. Ending lucrative agreements like this (and not setting them up in the first place) leaves Disney no choice but to hike prices to make up for this loss.
“I think ad-supported is an inevitable state for almost every service,” Schmitt says, noting that there’s a portion of viewers who will tolerate ads in order to get a lower subscription price. There have been a couple of rumors floating around about the possibility of Apple TV Plus incorporating ads, with a recent report from DigiDay indicating that Apple has been in talks with media agencies to bring commercials to the service. It’s also reportedly building an advertising network around its deal to stream Major League Soccer games, according to Bloomberg.
But even if a streaming service does generate some extra cash by licensing content to other platforms, this presents another problem that results in price hikes as well. Let’s take Disney, for example, which uses much of its own content to fill out Disney Plus and Hulu’s libraries.
Earlier this year, Disney took a $1 billion hit to end an unnamed licensing agreement early and get the content on its own platform. While Disney didn’t specify the content in question, some suspect it had to do with the company reacquiring the Marvel shows Netflix produced in the mid-2010s, like Jessica Jones and Daredevil, which now reside on Disney Plus. Ending lucrative agreements like this (and not setting them up in the first place) leaves Disney no choice but to hike prices to make up for this loss.
“The price of streaming services is reflective of the economic realities and costs that it takes to produce and distribute the content,” Schmitt says. “And I think the market is catching up with the fundamental physics of those costs.”
Paramount still makes money by licensing a boatload of its content to other services
Although Disney Plus added 9 million subscribers in the US over the past several months, it still lost $1.5 billion in direct-to-consumer revenue due to an “increase in programming and production costs” as well as a lack of straight-to-streaming cinematic releases. To further shore up its losses, Disney has also chosen to adopt the ad-supported model and will roll out the new $7.99 per month tier on December 8th.
While many are increasing prices because they can’t afford not to, it seems like some other services are just hopping on the price increase bandwagon because everyone else is doing it. Paramount’s chief financial officer Naveen Chopra basically admitted this in an earnings call earlier this month. “I think it’s fair to say that pricing is moving higher across the industry — you see that with a number of competing services,” Chopra said. “We think that means we have room to increase price.” Paramount Plus hasn’t increased its price in the US just yet, and that’s probably at least in part because it still makes money by licensing a boatload of its content to other services.
The platform exclusively houses content like most of the Star Trek franchise and an iCarly reboot, but a lot of Paramount’s content is on other platforms, including South Park, which is onHBO Max, and the massive hit Yellowstone, which lives on NBC Peacock. This might generate income in the short term, but it doesn’t help the streamer build out an attractive library like Netflix. It does seem like Paramount’s working on fixing the predicament it has put itself in, though, as it drove up subscribersby exclusively adding Halo and Yellowstone spinoff 1883. The service isalso releasing another Yellowstone prequel, 1923, in December.
As prices continue to go up, I expect a lot of people will be like me — ready to say enough is enough
And while I would mention HBO Max, its parent company’s megamerger with Discovery has created a dumpster fire worth an article of its own. As The Verge’s managing editor Alex Cranz points out, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is focused on “making as much money as cheaply as possible,” which means axingtons of content and cashing in on movies shown in theaters before later moving them to the service, eliminating the straight-to-streaming model. While Zaslav hasn’t mentioned a subscription price increase yet, he said during RBC’s Global TIMT Conference that “it’s going to be hard” to meet the company’s $12 billion earnings forecast if the current ad market doesn’t improve.
The way streaming services have things set up is a lose-lose situation. I committed to paying a base price for services like Netflix, only to get smacked with repeated price increases and questionable amounts of value added with low-effort originals and cheesy competition television shows. Luring folks in with a low intro price and then cranking things up was always the plan for many of these companies (Disney was especially open about it), but as prices continue to go up, I expect a lot of people will be like me — ready to say enough is enough. When the time comes, I’ll kick aside my Disney Plus or Funimation subscription (because even that’s gone up).
That’s how we got where we are now: paying $19.99 for a premium plan, $15.49 for the standard plan, or $9.99 for a basic subscription. But Netflix isn’t alone. Hulu raised the price of its ad-supported subscription for the first time last year, and younger services, like Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus (both of which launched in 2019), all raised their prices this year.
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