The year was 2006 and Fergie was dropping her debut solo album The Dutchess and dropped a bombshell confession to Time Magazine. She said she had been using it since at least her early 20s. This album dropped when she was 31. What made this confession a big deal is that there were a lot of drug stories going on at the time but they were moreso young girls either crashing out in public or playing up their bad behavior for attention. P!nk wrote a song about it called Stupid Girls mocking girls going out getting upskirt paparazzi pics taken on purpose with rehab stints the Hollywood starlet pipeline. She was at the peak of her career speaking about how she got over addiction.
She told Oprah she wasn’t happy in the girl group Wild Orchid she was in in the early 2000s and wanted to leave to pursue a solo career but didn’t know how to tell them. Then she spoke about the ultimate demise of the group when their label wouldn’t release their 3rd album which sent her into a tailspin. And though it had been years since her drug use, blogger Perez Hilton bullied her incessantly about it. In fact, he helped build his brand around mean girl picking on her calling her “Meth Face” criticizing changes in her appearance, leading to her releasing the song Pedestal pushing back on his behavior. And 3 years later the manager of the Black Eyed Peas at the time punched him in the face after he got into a back and forth with group member Will.I.Am to which no charges stuck as it was understood Perez was being antagonistic.
Today, admissions about drug use aren’t quite as scandalous as then. Hell Demi Lovato was using actual crack cocaine and somehow is still on the same record label as when she made that admission. Michael Jackson’s daughter Paris Jackson says she’s not only damaged her nose from doing cocaine but said she has a louder than normal whistle because of it. In her case, her father has had so much scandal in his life, she’s allowed a couple of her own.
The media is different around substance abuse today from what it used to be. Celebrities don’t try to have the perfect public images they used to try to maintain only to sit and get berated and cross examined by the Diane Sawyer’s of the world. They can now go on their own social media and share their stories without having to have their stomach in knots worried about what take someone like Barbra Walters might have. Perez Hilton himself has admitted that he was sorry for the way he’s treated a to of celebrities because even he knows he was the meanest of the mean probably in the history of blogging. The paparazzi also doesn’t hound celebrities the way they used to. The personal struggles of Britney Spears is what landed her in a conservatorship for all of those years. And Amy Winehouse saw an early grave from the profiting off of the issues she faced in her 20s.
Substance abuse today is treated more like a sickness to be treated and prevented. And this is something that Fergie was a trailblazer in addressing at the start of her solo career because this is around the time Toni Braxton left a label over them treating her like a liability just for being pregnant. We’ve come a long way. And honestly, if the currently President of the United States’ son Donald Trump, Jr. can do livestreams clearly amped up on cocaine, bullying people over substance abuse issues, shouldn’t be a thing, especially when they’re trying to deal with them themselves.
