Heroin Again Leaving A Mark On Arts Scene - Especially In Rock World

For a drug boasting such side effects as unbearable pain, extreme degradation and death, heroin has maintained a strangely seductive profile in the entertainment world.

The substance's staying power is evident in a list of lessons ignored: Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons, John Belushi, Sid Vicious, Chet Baker and, more recently, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and Blind Melon lead singer Shannon Hoon.

The roster is just a sampling of chapters in the history of heroin's infection of arts and entertainment. The latest entry is Jonathan Melvoin, the touring keyboardist with the bestselling Chicago rock band Smashing Pumpkins. He died, apparently of a heroin overdose, in a New York hotel room July 12.

On Wednesday, the band dropped its drummer, Jimmy Chamberlin, who police said was shooting up with Melvoin. Chamberlin was charged with heroin possession. His arrest puts him in the company of other entertainers similarly charged: actor Robert Downey Jr., Depeche Mode singer David Gahan and Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland.

Heroin's tragic mystique

Those unacquainted with heroin often profess confusion: How could talented people be drawn to a known addictive killer?

Yet over the years, heroin has retained a mystique unlike that of other drugs, such as cocaine, that are seen more as mere tickets for thrill rides. Heroin has represented something darker and

all-encompassing, sinister and yet alluring.

"I started doing heroin almost on purpose, because it seemed really romantic at the time," said Paul K., a rock musician from Lexington, Ky., who resorted to burglary to get money for his habit while living in New York City during the '80s. "Lou Reed, William Burroughs, `The French Connection,' Rimbaud. I figured anything that someone was willing to give up their sanity for, to crawl the streets for, must be wonderful."

The appeal, apparently, has grown. The Drug Enforcement Administration reports that heroin use is at a peak, with more high-grade dope available at lower prices. One recent estimate pegged the number of heroin addicts nationwide at 600,000.

"Heroin's the fad today," said a Hollywood-area Alcoholics Anonymous member, who asked not to be named. "It was before; it will be again. It's available, and there's a certain sinister glamor. You have `saints' like Jim Morrison and John Belushi, and so there's a kind of phony seductiveness to the idea that `If Morrison could shoot, I'm as talented as he is, I can shoot, too.'

"Why did Faulkner drink? Why did Hemingway drink? The junkie rock-'n'-roll star is the same romance."

The drug's popularity is reflected in popular culture. The sallow complexions, sunken eyes and emaciated figures often featured on today's fashion runways have been dubbed "heroin chic."

"Pulp Fiction," the sleeper movie sensation of two years ago, starred John Travolta in the role of a sympathetic heroin-addict hit man.

This summer's edgy up-and-comer movie is "Trainspotting," a lively tale of heroin addicts in Scotland.

Drug developed in 1898

Heroin is a morphine derivative developed by the Bayer Company of Germany in 1898 as a painkiller, but its harsh side effects led to its ban in many countries, including the U.S. Addicts usually inject it intravenously for maximum effect, though smoking or snorting it has become more popular.

Users report an initial, intense rush of a warm, glowing sensation, followed by hours in a stupor. But the drug is highly addictive, prompting users either to take it with increasing frequency or suffer from severe withdrawal.

Despite - or perhaps because of - its notoriety, heroin has attracted artists in various fields.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, a hot graffiti artist of the 1980s, was the contemporary art world's best-known and most recent casualty. A longtime heroin user, he died of an overdose at age 27 in 1988, and his story will hit movie screens in August in painter Julian Schnabel's debut film.

In literature, heroin's breakthrough as a serious topic - as opposed to lurid tales of "dope fiends" - came with Nelson Algren's 1949 novel, "The Man With the Golden Arm," a sordid but compassionate glimpse into the drug culture around Chicago's Division Street. The Beat Generation writers, most infamously William Burroughs in "Naked Lunch," soon would adopt heroin as their drug of choice.

Jazz's age of heroin peaked in the 1950s with Charlie Parker, the alto saxophone genius whose addiction led uncounted jazz artists to emulate him in the hope that they, too, might play at his level. Parker, who was ashamed of his addiction, implored his followers not to turn to heroin, but artists as formidable as the young Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Red Rodney and uncounted others took up the habit.

The drug culture in jazz, however, eventually dissipated as the bodies piled up (Parker died of an overdose, in 1955, at age 34) and musicians realized that heroin only impaired their abilities. Today's jazz stars tend to be squeaky-clean.

Heroin hits the rock world

Rock 'n' roll, however, is another story. Icons such as Keith Richards, John Lennon and Eric Clapton were known to have battled heroin, while others have succumbed. Many of today's biggest "alternative" bands have included members who either have struggled with or died from heroin.

In his harrowing 1967 Velvet Underground song named after the drug, Lou Reed grimly intoned, "Heroin - it's my wife, and it's my life."

Dr. Sheldon Greenberg, who reports having treated a number of rock stars for heroin addiction, said such musicians often seek to prolong the on-stage feeling of being adored.

"After a performance, it's their way of gaining some unusual degree of pleasure and escape," he said. "They feel entitled to do it, they feel special, they feel omnipotent. It's as if they're cats with nine lives, that they can do whatever they want to abuse their bodies, and it will be all right.

"Then you have the depressed rock star who, if they were to overdose, wouldn't care. They might feel it's scripted in them that they have to die this way."

Responding to the recent spate of drug incidents, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences has stepped up the publicity and services of its MusiCares Foundation, an assistance network for addicted musicians.

Some musicians have lost patience with fellow rockers' drug use. Buzz Osbourne, veteran guitar player in San Francisco's the Melvins and former mentor to Kurt Cobain, said in a recent interview, "I don't have a lot of sympathy for rock bands that use heroin and blame it on boredom, loneliness, whatever. There are a lot of spoiled rock-star brats out there using heroin."

But Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, whose hit single "Under the Bridge" addressed the loneliness and despair brought on by heroin addiction, has a different point of view. Hillel Slovak, the band's guitarist, died of a heroin overdose in 1988, and Kiedis himself has suffered from addiction.

"I think drug addiction and alcoholism take place in every aspect of society: doctors, lawyers, housewives, students, businessmen, bankers, unemployed actors, musicians," he said in a recent interview. "I have suffocated myself with drugs. . . . I couldn't create, I couldn't express love, I couldn't be with my family, I couldn't be with my friends.

"Fortunately I found a way out with the help of other people, because I couldn't do it myself. I don't regret it, I don't wish I could do it differently, but I'm glad I lived through it, because that is the exception: to be alive."