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 Elvie 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.
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Country artists singing about substance abuse is nothing new. The no-nonsense response to opioids, however, is a unique moment, according to country-music scholar Amanda Marie Martínez, a doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The growing demands country stars are making to take legal action against the opioid epidemic is an unparalleled development,” she says. “This is heavily attributable to the severity of the crisis, and a testament to the level of devastation it’s caused to communities across region, class and race.”