Young, Sick, Strung Out And Middle Class
By Brent Staples
NEW YORKHeroin came to my high school during our senior year
not in the hands of poor kids from the projects, but in needles dangling
from the tourniquettied arms of guys with hot rods, lavish wardrobes
and the best orthodontics their parents could buy. The heroin boys
were a cult. They huddled together at lunch, nodding out on their feet,
wiping noses that ran perpetually even in summer. In the evenings they
idled in side streets, passing needles back and forth, before driving
home to immaculately kept houses with two, sometimes three cars in
the driveways.
This was the end of the 1960s in a workingclass city near
Philadelphia. We were 90 minutes from New York City's Greenwich
Village, where a child of suburban affluence named Lou Reed had
become a star singing "Heroin," a song of worship. He sang while
pretending to tie off his arm and inject the drug. As the Iyrics said he
was happiest close to overdose when he was "closing in on death."
Federal officials say the middleclass romance with heroin is the
newest trend in American drug use. But this is hardly new. Heroin has
always been a plaything of the moneyed classes who could pay for
addiction without turning to crime or becoming ragged and homeless.
The myth that heroin was largely confined to the lower classes helped it
to spread undetected into the suburban middle class and beyond. Stand
outside the right methadone clinic and you will see men in business
suits picking up their heroin substitutes, trying to keep their habits in
check.
Many middleclass teenagers flirt with heroin as a way of
validating hipness and urban authenticity. Go any night to the Alphabet
City area of New York's Lower East Side and you see cherubic wellfed
teenagers out on urban safari, trawling the streets for drugs. Will their
parents notice when they nod out at the table? Or will they deny the
obvious, hiding behind the belief that junkies come only from "bad"
neighborhoods?
In the hip world of downtown, heroin has long since traveled in
the equivalent of the snuff box with hosts asking guests if they want a
snort. Highfashion models are only the latest subscribers, using heroin
first because it suppresses appetite, helping them stay thin.
The drug became a common accessory on photo shoots, and it
was only a matter of time before it became the subject of the
photographs themselves. "Heroin chic," as the movement came to be
called, required a wan, bedraggled look that romanticized addiction and
downandoutness. The concept snowballed as models and
photographers emulated a look that magazines wanted and that many
in the business were personally invested in.
Photographers blamed the modeling agencies for the look. The
agencies blamed the photographers, stylists and editorswith all sides
insisting that drug addiction was not part of the scene. The industry
stayed in denial until the death by overdose, a few months ago, of
Davide Sorrenti, a 20yearold photographer with prestigious clients like
Detour, Interview, Surface, Ray Gun and ID magazines and the
Japanese fashion companies Hysteric Glamour and Matsuda. His
photographs, portraying pale, thin, somnambulant models, have been
widely imitated. Drug users tend to recruit others. It is reasonable to
assume that Mr. Sorrenti did as well.
Magazine editors might have remained in denial if not for Mr.
Sorrenti's overdose and the bad publicity that followed. The editors are
now feverishly at work and by late fall "heroin chic" layouts will be
replaced by pictures that are said to look healthy and wholesome. But
before heroin chic returns to the shadows, we should reflect on its
lessons. The first is that addiction is a phenomenon that transcends
boundaries of class, race and income. The second is that it cannot be
contained and will swallow whole industries if left unchecked. The third
and most important lesson is that the fashion business will accomplish
nothing if it stops at "freshening up" its photographs. The real work lies
in changing the culture of the business, rooting out addicts, suppliers
and proselytizers.
The New York Times.