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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The Needle And The Damage Done Dangerous Heroin Re-Emerges As The Drug Of Cohice In The Entertainment Industry

Jim Sullivan The Boston Globe

“Cold turkey - has got me - on the run!” - John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1969)

Heroin. It’s the grim glue that binds the Scottish layabouts in “Trainspotting,” book and film. It’s the curse - and sometimes the muse - of Seattle rockers.

It recently killed Jonathan Melvoin, touring keyboardist with the Smashing Pumpkins, and resulted in the arrest of drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and the band’s sacking of him.

Actor Robert Downey Jr. keeps getting busted for it, going into rehab, running away and getting busted again. It’s said to hover around the emaciated waif-model look associated with Kate Moss.

USA Today, in a typical burst of alliterative glee, teased a recent story on heroin by calling it “hip, horrible and making headlines.”

You want to hear about how one junkie existed?

Here’s Steve Jones, Sex Pistols guitarist, about his long, slow dance with heroin after the Pistols fell apart, and he found himself penniless, at the end of the band’s American tour in early 1978: “The appeal for me is it totally made me not have to feel about anything, and that’s what was great about it. It checks you out. It’s not a social drug. I didn’t have the suss to go any other way, really.

“I stole everything off people who put me up on their couches. Going out and breaking into houses, finding some way to make the money, going to score, getting high. It killed me. That was my life. I did it for 10 years. I was sick of not having anywhere to live.”

He shot up after his ex-bandmate, Sid Vicious, overdosed and died. Didn’t that have any effect? “It doesn’t matter,” says Jones. “I’ve seen people die in front of me, OD and all that, but that don’t stop you. You’ve got to get to the place where you’re ready to stop yourself. You can tell some person till you’re blue in the face that this drug is gonna kill you and it’ll put you down the toilet. But they’re not gonna listen. I don’t preach to no one. I talk and share my experience of what drugs have done to me.”

Jones wonders about the new generation of heroin users, especially the rockers with big incomes. “A lot of these bands that got loads of money,” he says, “think they don’t have a problem ‘cause they’re selling loads of records… . I thank God I didn’t have money back then so I didn’t kill myself.”

The heroin controversy that boiled over earlier this year in Great Britain - and is likely to do here as well - revolves around “Trainspotting.” The cult book by Irvine Welsh has been made into a movie by “Shallow Grave” director Danny Boyle.

The main character, Mark Renton, will go to such depths, literally and figuratively, as to dive into a toilet to recover drugs. No wonder one of Renton’s curious straight buddies asks why he shoots smack. In the book, Renton answers: “It kinda makes things seem more real to us. Life’s boring and futile… . Basically, we live a short, disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with … things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless. Smack’s an honest drug, because it strips away these delusions… . It’s the only real honest drug.” (Welsh’s phonetic rendition of Scottish dialect has been edited out here.)

“I saw ‘Trainspotting,’ ” says Jones. “It really hit home for me. I think it was more realistic than making (heroin use) a cool thing to do. The problem is it’s humorous as well, and that might be what makes it (seem) glamorous, I would imagine.”

Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten also has mixed views on “Trainspotting.” “The book is very good,” he says. “The film, I think, has the same problem that the ‘Sid & Nancy’ movie had: It seems to celebrate heroin addiction as something kind of glorious. Young kids, who are naive, would view it as a good lifestyle. And I really despise that.”

Not much good happens to anybody in the movie “Trainspotting.” Humorous situations do crop up - this group of hapless yobbos has the collective sense and smarts of a vapor trail - but the end result of their drug use is clearly negative. Burglary. Selfnullification. Jail. Rehab. Withdrawal - a particularly nasty scene involving grisly hallucinations. Death.

More than a quarter-century ago, Lou Reed, then of the Velvet Underground, penned what is still the definitive song about the darkest, most seductive of drugs. It was called “Heroin” and Reed sang, “It’s my life and it’s my wife / Because a mainer in my vein / Leads to a center in my head / And then I’m better off dead.” The rhythm pulses and pounds, nervously - then comes a sensuous rush. And then there’s Reed, the singer, stepping back to talk of trying to “nullify” his life.

Heroin is a morphine derivative developed in Germany at the turn of the century. Today, it comes from south Asia, Mexico and, increasingly, from Colombia. Some cocaine dealers are branching out to offer heroin - it’s called double-breasting - and George Festa, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in New England, says it’s gotten even more insidious recently: “Cocaine will be sold with a free heroin sample. Many people using cocaine are now using heroin in conjunction with it.”

Purity is up. Prices are down. The need to use needles is diminished - initially. You can snort it or smoke it.

Dee Dee Ramone, the founding Ramones bassist, wrote “Chinese Rock” with his pal, the Heartbreakers’ late Johnny Thunders, about “living on a Chinese rock” of heroin and finding “all my best things are in hock / Everything is in the pawn shop.”

“Drugs make everything worse,” Ramone said, when he was in Boston to play a post-Ramones club gig in 1992. He was in the process of trying to kick heroin - and having to fend off wannabe punks who’d give him loaded syringes. “It’s humiliating,” he said of drugs. “I was under the rule of them and they were the boss. They’re not an alternative to depression; they make it worse. We all find that out.

“I was kicking dope and praying and praying, getting down on my knees. I got so angry. Why me? Why do I have to be cursed like this?”

But he has survived. “Most of all, I feel like I’ve been given a break by God or something,” he said.

Pete Townshend of the Who, sipping tea in a New York hotel room in 1985, drew this metaphor about his drug use, the past and the future: “I’ve been living in a garbage can all my life, so I remain living in a garbage can. I know a lot of it is going to rub off on me and touch me, but it just isn’t going in my mouth anymore.”

Townshend’s abyss? End of 1981. “I reduced myself to a gibbering heap of rubble and then woke up one night in some venue with a couple of bottles of brandy, (having) injected myself with whatever was available. I was literally just about breathing, covered in blood and warts and slime and phlegm and vomit and still I was surrounded by people who wanted to get close to me.”

Gibby Haynes, a recovering drugalcohol abuser in the Butthole Surfers, disagrees with the idea that heroin is a rock ‘n’ roll problem. As to reasons for its resurgence, Haynes notes the purity and the increasing role of the market-savvy Colombians. “The customers last longer on heroin” than cocaine, he said.

But a connection to rock? Haynes doesn’t think so. “I’ve been in, like, two rehabs,” he says, “with 100 people and among those 100 people only me and two other guys have been musicians. I don’t think the disease of alcohol and drugs affect musicians more than, say, stockbrokers. If it is indeed a disease it just isn’t passed down from rock ‘n’ roll father to rock ‘n’ roll son.”

Festa, of the DEA, concurs: “I see it across every stratum and every nationality.”

Still, you wonder … is using heroin rock ‘n’ roll’s version of climbing Mount Everest? (The survival rate of those mountain climbers isn’t encouraging.) Or is it stumbling into a seductive trap? Fatuously trying to push the extreme, emulate dead heroes, indulge in the grand rock myth? Why do so many rockers seem to seek out heroin? All of Aerosmith - most publicly singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry - did, before the group and its management became rock’s most adamant antidrug spokesmen.

“I asked Steven and Joe years ago,” says manager Tim Collins. “I was snorting cocaine and drinking with them. They wanted me to try heroin - I had always drawn a line. I thought cocaine was socially acceptable. I thought, ‘Heroin - that’s drug addiction.’ I said, ‘What makes you guys want to do it?’ They said, ‘You have no idea. It’s better than sex.’ I said ‘What got you guys doing it?’ and they said ‘Mick (Jagger) and Keith (Richard) did it’ and they were their heroes. It was that simple.

“I was visiting a friend’s kid at McLean’s recently and he told me he did it because Kurt Cobain did it. Life is difficult; when you shoot heroin, it’s not so; it’s an oasis in the desert. We all have a desire to live and to accomplish things and we all have a death wish, the part of us that lives on the edge.”

And how much glamour is there out on this edge? “Here they were, my heroes, and they were penniless - $10 million in debt,” says Collins. “Joe was a rail, emaciated, couldn’t focus or play like he used to; he was one unhappy sonofagun. Steve was so crazy he wasn’t even in reality. He’d gone past the genius/insanity line. Everything was about that next fix. Joe said it best: ‘Originally, we were musicians dabbling in drugs and we became drug addicts dabbling in music.”’

Tyler and Perry celebrate a clean decade on Halloween. Collins celebrates his 10th just before then.

Of heroin’s portrayal in the media, the DEA’s Festa says, “I remember that with ‘Saturday Night Live’ in the ‘70s drug use was a big joke. Then I saw it portrayed as a possible evil. But I’m starting to see that laxness back in industry, where drugs are now joked about. It’s tragic to see it coming back so easily.”

Questions have come up as to what the music industry should do, if anything, to discourage heroin use. Aerosmith’s Collins penned an op-ed piece for The New York Times recently. He wrote: “As a band manager and a recovering drug addict myself, I know well the pressures that help drive musicians into drug abuse: the insecurities, the inflated expectations, the problems of instant (perhaps temporary) fame, the constant traveling that brings a sense of dislocation.”

“We only talk about this stuff for people who want to know about it,” says Collins. “There are people in the industry who feel we’re trying to impose things on them. But there’s no reason these artists have to keep dying.”

Collins advises intervention, support during recovery and education. Most of all, he thinks executives from the six major labels should make the problem a primary concern.

He heralds the program set up by Michael Greene, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, to help musicians struggling with addiction. There is a 24-hour toll-free number (800-687-4227), with staffers who will refer musicians on the road to confidential, recovery-oriented groups in the area.

Collins figures record companies owe it to their artists. “Record labels make a lot of money” from musicians’ work, he says. “Just consider it like research and development - it’s giving money back to keep them alive.”

Jones, who is back with the reunited Sex Pistols, wrote a song about heroin all after he kicked. It wasn’t subtle. He called it “Drugs Suck.”