The passing of grunge rocker Chris Cornell this week means that of the five major bands to emerge from the early 1990s’ grunge scene, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and Nirvana all have lost lead singers to early deaths.
Only Pearl Jam has not. 
Mostly, these were singers whose lives were mangled by heroin/opiates, whether they died from it or not.
As I read the news, it occurred to me how deeply the grunge scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s swallowed the greatest drug scam ever sold, which is that heroin use is somehow a sign that the user is a rebel, an outsider, an artist finding his own tormented path on the margin of a claustrophobically conformist society.
The reality is that the drug, more than any other, is about commerce – about cold, hard business — and about enslavement to consumption. All of which, needless to say, is about as low-brow conformist as it comes.
Heroin should have been forgotten not long after it was invented for it has few medicinal benefits that other opiates don’t provide with far less addictive risk. It survived because it was a great drug for traffickers. It was easy to conceal, easy to cut, and it created customers that had to buy the product several times a day. A businessman’s dream.
The drug got its underground cachet beginning with Charlie Parker, the legendary saxophonist in the 1940s, who died in 1955 at the age of 34, having wasted much of his prodigious creativity in the pursuit of smack, while bringing an entire generation of younger musicians to dope. (Trumpeter Clifford Brown was staking out another path for jazz musicians – one of great devotion to art and improvisation combined with a sober lifestyle – when he was killed in a car accident at age 25.)
Beat writer William Burroughs helped solidify the drug’s reputation as an outsider’s substance.
Heroin got a bigger cultural boost from the Velvet Underground’s first album in 1967 and Lou Reed’s “Heroin,” followed as the years passed by notably addicted rockers like Johnny Thunders, Sid Vicious and, of course, Keith Richards. So that by the late 1980s, heroin was fully established as the go-to drug for anyone – often a pasty-faced white kid with a rocknroll heart — wanting a personal image as a non-conformist.
To the extent of few others before it, the grunge scene bought this fiction with gusto. Heroin, moreover, seemed the perfect drug for grunge’s nihilistic, dirge-like sound. So an entire scene was created that seemed to emerge from the swamp of the Velvet Underground’s first album. Many others died from it. Grunge did, too.
My music was punk rock and the grunge thing happened later. My focus in life was by then on writing and storytelling and not so much on the latest wrinkle in rocknroll. Grunge was too slow, too hopeless and depressing. Also, I lived in Seattle during this time, and didn’t like the city and left as soon as I could and moved to Mexico. So all in all, grunge didn’t do much for me. (Stone Temple Pilots were a bit different, and appealed to me more, in that the music was less grungy and they weren’t from Seattle, though their singer’s story is the same.)
There was, nevertheless, a do-it-yourself ethos to the scene that I found attractive. Bands were especially afraid of “selling out,” thus many of them first signed with the local Sub Pop label.
It’s a sad epitaph to the scene that the folks who created it fought mightily to avoid the taint of commercialism in their music and conformity in the way they lived — and ran, as they did, to the embrace of a drug that embodied everything they were fleeing.
I love Seattle, and many Seattle bands: Treepeople, Murder City Devils, Supersuckers, The Lewd, Hendrix too many too name! Seattle is the most beautiful city on earth imo + I like the rain, salmon, the beer, Afri Cola at Trader Joe’s, the coffee and alas I like heroin (I know it’s destructive on every level, and the drug laws don’t help, but damn on a cold rainy day in December: The Dope Feels Good. (I absolutely do not condone opiate use especially to self medicate chances are if you self medicate you will become addicted)
with this logic as our eyes looking glass we can just as easily say,
60s rock, LSD, & conformity?
70s rock, pabst blue ribbon + seconal, & conformity?
disco, cocaine, & conformity?
hip hop, weed, & conformity?
how about that dick clark hit factory disney ad nausea jams on the air waves today, the xanax bars needed to avoid panic attacks via”anxiety”, & this time the anxiety is coming from the fact that everyone seems to think this music is great and I want to fit in, conform but im afraid without the xanax i’d throw the radio out the window panic style. lol (i dont take xanax this was a joke btw)
for real tho who the hell looked up to any of the grunge rockers using H and decided yeah thats what I wana do. if you are that impressionable well shit ur kinda screwed. Opiates can cause harm yes but what causes more harm is opiate use when we can’t even be honest with ourselves or each other what these substances are. Man loves to personify objects and things he doesn’t understand, why? well because its a hell of a lot easier to say that there drug is the devil, it makes me act this way like a jack ass im powerless to control myself or take responsibility for my actions and here is the 12 step group I meet with daily that helps reinforce all these other learned behaviors some good but others not so good. I don’t want to see more people strung out on drugs and I used to believe they should be illegal until I realized that by keeping these things illegal it also stifles all rational discourse about what this is really all about. a good doctor would say drug use is a symptom of a much bigger issue(s) in society, we can’t begin to even discuss that subject if we continue chasing our tails calling it a “heroin epidemic”, there may surely be an increase in opiate use sure, but who ever coins it the “epidemic” isn’t trying to help us find a true solution, they are selling more of the same bull they always have been..problem,reaction, solution… distraction and distortion of the “problem” they helped create, using propaganda to sway opinions to get the public “reaction” needed, and finally they provide the pill to cure the ill, in this case more crack downs on your liberty, more heavy handed law enforcement, whatever its gonna be u can count on its gonna be more needed from common everyday people every time period. Take the profit of illegality away and when we can start being truly honest and real about what these drugs really are, the “taboo” will fall away, I really can’t see drugs becoming a more popular thing after that. Sure there will always be drug use but so long as that person is able to feel that drug isn’t taking away more from him/her than they are getting out of it and aren’t hurting anyone else, its their freedom to do it and we should respect that. All behavior is learned, just because you enjoy to drink alcohol doesn’t mean you have to be an jackass and drink&drive. just like wanting to copy a musicians habits, or thinking that somehow this drug will make u creative, again, if we were honest about these substances these misconceptions wouldn’t fly.
sam i dig a lot of your work a lot, you care about what you are talking about and aren’t just trying to shill bullshit. I respect that you keep an open comment section, many writers who talk about these subjects don’t like to pass the talking stick.
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One minor correction: Stone Temple Pilots were lumped into the grunge scene and were often accused of being Pearl Jam rip-offs but they came out of San Diego, not Seattle.
People in general are ignorant. Sports and alcohol , for example, are two big areas of commerce that are quite deadly. Tailgating , over consumption of a liquid that is nothing more than a “cleaning fluid” and sold as a food item coupled with the brain damage of Football head injuries and other permanent bodily damage to young people in pursuit of some odd dream of becoming a winner and all around great person .
Bologna. Rock and Roll was a better goal. And God forbid that people would be taught to be “happy” from early on. That in itself is the deadly element of conforming and either complying or not. In the end, whether it’s the Grunge artists’ angst or the old Bluesmen’s burdensome song, we’re taught Not to be Happy. Because a society comprised of happy people would not buy whatever it is that’s being sold as a destination point. But we still have hope – maybe in another few hundred generations here on Earth. Happy people that don’t buy into the marketed Dream. Happy people with nothing to be irritated and forlorn about.
As a female in long-term recovery who grew up in the 60s in a small, mostly affluent Ohio town, I remember that when my brother got caught using heroin, I was shocked and terrified. You just didn’t do that drug. The social landscape is very different now – the young veterans I work with are not afraid. They are familiar with prescription narcotics and they want both the excitement they experienced in battle, and to escape from terrible memories. For those who are not veterans, there is still the young person’s desire for exploration and conquest. Heroin seemingly offers both the feeling and the challenge – as well as a way to “escape” a society that offers them less and less opportunity to attain the American Dream. It’s absolutely the story of Portsmouth, Ohio, where I lived for two years in the early 80s, and which you so eloquently write about. Musicians and artists, as we know, are often the barometers of the injustices and inequities in a culture. Your observation that heroin is the worst expression of commerce and capitalism without values is absolutely right on – and young people are the least able to see that. Their brains and bodies crave new experiences. Pair this with a societal context with less financial opportunity and in which families are overly stressed in most areas of life, and you have the perfect recipe for alienation, anger and escape. In that case, it is easy to become attracted to what is traditionally seen as “nonconformist” without the older person’s capacity for reflection on the larger cultural and economic backstory.
I disagree with your assumption that Chris, Kurt and the other heroin users are somehow conformists because of their heroin use. They are above all artists. Many artists have traditionally used drugs. Some believe they enhance their creativity. Look at the Beatles and Sgt. Pepper as an example. Many famous writers have used drugs, also Sherlock Holmes, a heroin user and Sigmund Freud a cocaine user. You cannot demonize drug use as conformity for these artists as they are so rich that they don’t care one bit what the stuff costs.
The FDA and the DEA would like everyone to believe that the dosage must constantly escalate and that you cannot function as a productive member of society. These are lies. If true, everyone prescribed an opioid would become a lifelong user. People can use these drugs and lead a normal life as long as supply and quality are maintained. The reason for Chris and Kurt’s suicides we’ll probably never know. I might add that self medication has always been a part of human existence. No law will ever stop this. Prohibition of alcohol never worked. You have no idea if these artists used drugs to be non-conformist or they simply liked to experiment and found out they liked them or if they are dealing with a profound deep-seated pain or mental illness that these medications provided some relief from.
This spotlight on the dichotomy of the perceived “outsider’s cachet” of use of heroin by the user (“sexy”), and the cold, hard commercial forces driving the drug’s proliferation (“NOT so sexy–except for the $$$”) is insightful to the point of unique in my experience of reading on this topic and working in the field of addiction medicine. As a fan of Dreamland and Sam’s writing, I admire his examination of the business of heroin trafficking via Mexico and how it changed the trajectory of our opioid epidemic after prescription painkillers set the stage.
It may, however, be tempting to place too much emphasis on the heroin user’s desire to be a hip outsider. There are quite a number of factors that draw people into an opioid use disorder, and Sam knows as well as anyone that this can happen to anyone, including the quarterback of the football team in a small town environment, now that heroin is available there and pills remain relatively easy to find. My point is, while it may be true that artists and creative types are often drawn to seeking out mind-altering chemicals, they certainly don’t represent the majority of users these days, if they ever did. They may still have an outsized influence on the young and impressionable due to their fame and the impact of their art.
Love your blog. I humbly suggest “cachet” is the spelling you might be looking for.
many thanks for the correction. done!
Woah thanks so much for this !!! I loved this post so much, and I think THIS is really key to breaking down what’s going on in our country right now with the opiate epidemic. It is becoming harder and harder (in my opinion) to stand out, and more and more important that one does, and heroin provides this strange mysticism, especially if youre able to maintain a somewhat decent life while you’re doing it. You feel like you have discovered some secret that all the other idiots haven’t, when the truth is just the opposite. Like, holy shit, this piece was mind blowing. I’d like to see you write a longer exploration of this idea, as I feel there is so much more you could say.
Thanks so much.
Charlie Parker did not die of an overdose. His health was compromised due to the problems associated with prohibition. Fifty sixty years on and the situation is much the same yet the war on drugs continues.
good point. He died of many complications from drug use. Corrected.
Brilliantly said, and in particular: ” the greatest drug scam ever sold, which is that heroin use is somehow a sign that the user is a rebel, an outsider, an artist finding his own tormented path on the margin of a claustrophobically conformist society, which he bravely rejects, and the proof of that is that he uses a forbidden substance like heroin. The reality is that the drug, more than any other, is about commerce – about cold, hard business — and about enslavement to consumption. All of which, needless to say, is about as low-brow conformist as it comes.”
So no mention of my fiance Andrew Wood even though Pearl Jam wouldn’t exist if he had not overdosed on heroin. I never used with him by the way. Only the people who knew the people you did mention understand and even then its really God own mystery. As I sit on my deck on Alki Beach in Seattle and ponder how turning 50 will feel in a couple of months, I ask myself ” What was so bad in their life to commit slow or fast suicide ” . The more time passes the more it seems weak and childish to me. My life is pretty amazing. There are great bands coming out of Seattle like Ten Miles Wide. I film almost every weekend. Its barbecues live music and tacos and making out on the beach with my husband and laughing at silly stuff. People need to get over their bad childhoods or insecurities and accept life on lifes terms. Anyone rich poor famous not famous can do drugs or drink themselves to death. It takes strength to face old age and all the pain that comes with it..in the words of a great writer…
The world is a fine place and worth fighting for
Xana La Fuente
Writer, monkey tamer, taco maker
@ xanaland.com
Chode free publication since 2012