Cover image of This Thug’s Life by Mopreme Shakur (Dafina, 2026)
The below excerpt is taken from This Thug’s Life (Dafina, 2026), the first-ever insider account of the Shakur family, the iconic hip hop group T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., and the life and death Tupac Shakur—written by Mopreme Shakur, the legendary rapper’s big brother and eldest son of Black liberation activist Mutulu Shakur.
In this passage, the author describes when the Young Lords and Black Panthers occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx in an effort to demand better care and basic patients’ rights, and the ground-breaking work his father Mutulu carried out as the medical director of Lincoln Detox.
Just before I came back to NYC, my father, the Panthers, and the Young Lords—an organization fighting for, among other things, the independence of Puerto Rico—had taken over the drug rehabilitation center at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, which had the most deplorable conditions. The New York Times quoted a community member once who called it the Butcher Shop, and the name stuck. The Butcher Shop was supposed to have been condemned, but without the will to build a hospital to serve the community, the city left it operating. The care was appalling, but it was the only hospital for Black and brown folks in the South Bronx. In 1970, a group consisting mostly of non-medical staff who were also members of the Young Lords and Black Panthers occupied Lincoln Hospital in what was known as The Takeover. After negotiating with the city and the administration, they received a number of concessions that improved care, most notably a patient’s bill of rights—which became the blueprint for the patient’s bill of rights we still have in the U.S. today.
The city and administrators also agreed to allow certain programs to continue under the control of the community. One of those programs was Lincoln Detox, the hospital’s detoxification clinic, which prior to that was simply dispensing methadone. The community was wary of methadone, viewing it as equally addictive as heroin with worse lifestyle outcomes because it tied you to the particular clinic for regular doses instead of actually detoxifying—liquid handcuffs.
This was all around the time my dear old dad had begun to pursue acupuncture and sought to educate himself so he could use it in the community. The first time he saw it in use was in Chinatown when he was with Nobuko Miyamoto, herself an accomplished artist and activist. Nobuko and Mutulu were both close with Yuri Kochiyama, who was previously a member of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) and also one of the founding members of the RNA (Republic of New Afrika), who had a very close friendship with Malcolm X, holding him in her arms as he lay dying. Mutulu had a deep network and he, Walter Bosque (a Young Lord who worked at Lincoln Hospital as a phlebotomist), Richard Delaney (a friend and former roommate), and Richard Bird (upon whom the titular character in Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly is largely based), sought out a place to learn, but acupuncture was illegal in New York at the time. Plus, there weren’t really programs as much as apprenticeships, which were long. On top of that, there was a language barrier—the masters didn’t speak English or Spanish, and Mutulu, the Richards, and Walter didn’t speak Chinese. They learned what they could in New York, but they were limited by the circumstances of the time. They eventually found a school in Montreal and went there to learn.
My father was seeing young men coming back from Vietnam addicted to heroin, and he saw the system’s response to opioid addiction with methadone as equally problematic, just switching one addiction for another. He was a great believer in the potential of acupuncture, and after studying in Montreal, he went on to study in China and eventually got licensed in California, which had a licensure program at the time; he believed that Eastern medicine was something we needed to utilize more in the West, especially as it related to addiction treatment. Even with acupuncture illegal in New York at the time, they were going to put it to use to prove its effectiveness.
By this time, the Black Panthers and Young Lords had taken over Lincoln Hospital, kicked out the bureaucrats, and made certain demands of the city. Beyond demanding free, universal healthcare—the first to prominently link it to basic human rights—they also demanded that the city not allow a methadone clinic, so that they could treat addicts with acupuncture instead. They obviously didn’t get universal healthcare, but the city negotiated the rest with hospital administrators, some of whom were members of the Young Lords and the same chapter of the Black Panthers as Afeni.
In 1972, Zayd Shakur, Salahdeen Shakur’s son, referred Mutulu to Cleo Silvers, the hospital’s administrator, herself a member of the Young Lords and the Bronx Chapter of the Black Panthers, and the chief community negotiator during The Takeover, asking her to bring him on as the medical director of the detox clinic. By the time I had returned from down South, Cleo had taken him on, and my father was the medical director of Lincoln Detox, responsible for educating practitioners in techniques of inner-ear acupuncture and coordinating the political education that they were combining with the acupuncture into a therapeutic protocol. As a result, my father would often take us with him to Lincoln Detox. The way everyone there treated him and talked to him, it was clear that he was the man.
This part is amazing, and just one of the million reasons why my dad was the shit. They started treating over two hundred patients a day, combining a five-point protocol that used points on the inner ear with group therapy in the form of political education classes. My dad developed this new protocol out of necessity—on the one hand, to comply with the ever-shifting demands of the city council and those administrators who were actively trying to undermine their work. But on the other hand, because it worked, essentially combining their version of talk therapy, political education, and massage with a known acupuncture treatment for addiction. It was groundbreaking and truly healing for the community, particularly for the recovering addicts—many of whom went on to learn the protocol and treat other patients themselves. My dad had been inspired by the barefoot doctors of China: each one, teach one. There was a lot of political intrigue and bullshit going on while my dad was there, but one thing that was for sure is that Mutulu saw to it that a lot of people got the treatment they needed. So much so that one of the doctors the hospital and city administrators required to “oversee” their work subsequently stole the protocol, in complete contradiction to the community-based healing for which they were fighting.
As an adult, I now understand how radical my father was. I mean, just saying this sounds crazy: Back in the ’70s, my father saw that methadone was just as toxic and addictive as heroin and decided to take over a clinic to use a combination of inner-ear acupuncture, massage, and therapy instead. Goddamn, the balls he needed to have!
And he was right, too: This protocol would eventually become the blueprint for the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA), an addiction treatment protocol that’s now used all over the world. It’s worth noting that the founder of NADA is the guy who stole this protocol, never properly credited my dad for his work until 2021, and has never compensated him to this day. But as a kid, I didn’t know or appreciate any of that. I just saw my father walking around in a setting where he was clearly respected, clearly in charge, clearly a leader, and that love and respect was passed down to us as kids. Pacqui and I would drink the little cups of Tang that they had for the addicts that were jonesing. It was full of vitamin C, but there was also so much sugar! It’s the sugar that the addicts needed, and we kids loved it, too. We would run around on that sugar high and just talk to the people, and I’ve been told that they really liked having us kids there because it normalized drug rehabilitation, which so often felt taboo.
The city shut down Lincoln Detox in 1979, when the program came into the crosshairs of a political environment that was very much threatened by the idea of Black empowerment. In particular, a young Chuck Schumer, at the time a council member, had a particular bug up his butt about the political education aspect, which he called an effort to radicalize the population. Of course, they also accused the clinic of various financial improprieties, but you can never trust bureaucrats to keep an honest ledger when there’s a political motivation. There was also a close relationship between any Democrat on the rise, particularly in New York at that time, and the Rockefellers, an extremely powerful political family that was also heavily invested in pharmaceuticals, including methadone.
It didn’t take my father long, however, to open up another community clinic called BAAANA (Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America). They set up in a brownstone in Harlem on Strivers’ Row and continued practicing holistic healthcare. It was so unique. They no longer had city funding, so they took on paying patients and were entirely community funded. They held seminars on healthy eating and juicing. They continued political education, but were able to expand it because they were no longer beholden to the city’s regulations. It became, because it could be, more organically connected to the political and cultural organizations they were allied with at the time. It was a hub of … everything.
