Ice-T is standing up and using his voice for good.
The rapper and actor, 67, hosts the new A&E documentary Fame and Fentanyl, which sheds light on the devastating toll fentanyl has taken on modern-day America.
“I’ve been doing voiceovers and narration for lots of different topics, but I’m at a point in my life where I want to do things that are important,” Ice-T tells PEOPLE about signing on to host the documentary, which premieres Aug. 25.
“Every once in a while, something comes along that’s really important, and I wanna put my stamp on that.”
The deadly impact of fentanyl is personal for Ice-T; he lost two close friends to the drug. “I knew Coolio since he started rapping. He was out with me. I took him on tour. He was one of my closer friends in hip-hop who went off to do his thing and blow up,” he says of his fellow rapper, who died in 2022 at age 59.
“And Mike [Michael K. Williams], I was planning on working with him on projects that we had written and talked about.” Williams died 2021 at age 54.
For the Law & Order: SVU star, Coolio’s death was less surprising than the secrecy that initially surrounded it. “People know certain people are getting high, so it’s not like you’re saying, ‘Oh, well, Coolio never did drugs.’ We knew Coolio would get high,” he explains. “I didn’t know to what extent, you know, but to die and for them to say it was asthma, we said, ‘Bulls—.’ We all suspected fentanyl, and it didn’t come out for a while, and it just really nailed in the situation. Like, this is what’s killing people.”
Learning of Williams’s death was both shocking and deeply painful. “With Mike, I didn’t know he was still getting high. I thought that was in his past because he spoke freely about his past, so that kind of caught me off guard,” Ice-T recalls.
“But it hurts. It hurts. It’s like having somebody die in a car accident. People die of natural causes, but then always when you have a sudden death like that, it really, really hurts your friends. I think it blindsides everybody because people do drugs, but at the end of the day, nobody is doing them trying to die. It’s tragic.”
Through the documentary, Ice-T hopes to raise awareness about fentanyl’s dangers and the devastating consequences of the drug. “In our doc, we show how little it takes to kill you, and I think the only way we’re gonna stop it is with education that there is poison on the street,” he says.
“In hip-hop, when people were doing crack in the early days, it was a fashionable drug, but when we figured out what it was doing, we made crack whack. So what we have to do as a public is make this shit so unpopular and uncool. As my wife [Coco Austin] and I say, ‘It’s not worth the party.’ To me, it’s more about educating the people that this can kill you the very first time you try it.”
Ice-T is no stranger to discussing drugs and crime. The actor, who has starred on SVU for over 25 years, will be attending CrimeCon on Sept. 6 and 7 to continue the conversation and host the event’s 4th annual CLUE Awards. “It’s all about the whole genre of crime, television, crime shows and things like that,” he tells PEOPLE about the weekend. “People know I’m not the police, but I’ll be talking to folks about the show, my experiences on SVU, and maybe my past life in crime. We’ll see where it goes.”
Fame and Fentanyl premieres Aug. 25 on A&E.
