Opioids Came for Country Music

NOT JUST WILLIE’S WEED –

April 23, 2024 – DRUGS NEVER SEEMED like a problem to Elvie Shane. Dabbling in cocaine, meth, and heroin were all part of the future country singer’s college days in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Even when he got hooked on speed, the dangers didn’t seem real. He could take it or leave it, he figured, a good time for whenever he had the money. With fentanyl and pills flooding communities at the heart of the genre, artists such as Brad Paisley, Elvie Shane, Jaime Wyatt, and others are meeting the crisis in song and in action.

“We just thought we were having fun and catching a buzz,” says Shane, who was clean for nearly a decade before scoring a country Number One with “My Boy” in 2021, over a Zoom call from his home in Nashville. “It wasn’t until I started seeing my friends drop like flies that I realized we were playing with fire.”

That was before the opioid crisis ravaged Shane’s home state of Kentucky, much of neighboring Appalachia, and virtually every corner of the U.S., especially rural areas like the one where he grew up: Caneyville, population just more than 500. “Hard drugs were a big-city problem,” Shane recalls. “The word ‘overdose’ was very, very rare.”

Today, drug overdoses kill more than 100,000 people annually in this country, with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, touted as the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 18 to 45. Those figures led Shane to come clean about his drug abuse on the 2023 single “Pill,” one of two songs from his new album, Damascus, that address the crisis.