High-profile rockers spotlight addiction — and treatment programs that are saving lives
As it turned out, it was a sad, solitary exit for Layne Staley, the lead voice of Seattle's Alice in Chains, whose death last month followed a long-publicized battle with heroin addiction.
His passing has revived questions about heroin use here at a time when — despite a decline in heroin-related deaths from record highs in 1998 — it remains the drug that kills more people each year than any other.
This latest celebrity death once again turns the spotlight on rock musicians, whose visibility has painted them, sometimes unfairly, as mirrors of societal woes and torchbearers of a well-worn ethos that prescribes living for today because tomorrow may never come.
Those who loom larger than life leave lasting impressions in death, claiming our attention whenever heroin takes another life: Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, in 1994; Shannon Hoon, lead singer for Blind Melon, in 1995; Sublime vocalist Brad Nowell and Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, in 1996; John Baker Saunders of Mad Season, with whom Staley played, in 1999. And now Staley.
Heroin and other drugs are big-enough concerns for the music business that there's a need for agencies like Seattle's Musicians Assistance Program (MAP), a no-fee service funded by the Recording Industry Association of America, and MusiCares, the health-and-human-services arm of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
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The good news for Seattle is that such programs, supplementing broader efforts in the greater community, appear to be helping reduce heroin-related fatalities.
Heroin-related deaths in King County have continued to drop over the past three years after a spike in 1998, when 143 such deaths were recorded. Sixty-one people died in 2001, the lowest number of heroin-related deaths in the county since 1992, when 58 deaths were recorded, according to Caleb Banta-Green of the University of Washington's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, who also represents Seattle on a national council that monitors addiction and abuse trends in 20 cities.
The reason, recovery advocates believe, is higher visibility and greater availability of treatment programs, including those that allow imprisoned addicts to continue treatment while serving sentences. Through June 2001, 1,176 people were admitted for heroin-related treatment in the county, compared with 725 during the same period of 1999, said Banta-Green.
The chronicling of addicts' sordid struggles is a common theme in much of the grunge music written during its heyday in the early '90s — such as Alice in Chains' 1992 release "Dirt."
Vampirelike seductiveness
The band's music had a vampire-like seductiveness, with melodic hooks and dark lyrics buried beneath beautifully ghoulish harmonies and grinding metal.
Alice in Chains was as emblematic as any band of the flannel-wearing grunge image that pushed Seattle into the national spotlight, a phenomenon that crested along with its 1994 release "Jar of Flies," the first EP ever to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
Those known for staying clean — members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, for example — were overshadowed by those who succumbed to heroin, including Mother Love Bone vocalist Andrew Wood in 1990 and guitarist Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch in 1993.
Then, in 1994, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain killed himself a week after nearly dying of a heroin overdose, just as Staley was returning from rehab at the Hazelden Foundation Clinic in Minnesota.
But after appearing on a 1996 cover of Rolling Stone that read, "The Needle and the Damage Done," Staley all but disappeared, and his continuing addiction reportedly kept the band from developing significant new projects.
It's a pattern MAP counselor Mike Kinder often sees. Calls come from musicians kicked out of newly signed bands at the behest of record companies unwilling to take on their addiction problems. Others are simply eager to deal with a habit that has earned them reputations among club owners or recording executives as unreliable or risky.
A longtime professional drummer and recovering cocaine and alcohol addict, Kinder has been helping musicians get treatment for four years, referring clients to renowned, California-based facilities such as the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage and the Pasadena Recovery Center.
Many musicians, Kinder says, don't have health insurance. Even those successful enough to afford it often don't use it if they fear that news of their treatment might be leaked publicly, he said.
The other end of the phone
Inquiries also come from touring performers referred by similar agencies nationwide.
"I'll get people in recovery who'll call me up and ask, where's a good meeting to go to, or it'll be the music community putting together safe rooms for people on tour," Kinder says. "You'd be surprised who can be on the other end of the telephone."
While it's promising that more people in the industry want to insulate themselves from temptation, he cautions that it's often not simply success that has introduced them to the opiate. National numbers show that a growing number of users are dabbling in heroin as teenagers, he said. That troubling trend has yet to turn up in King County statistics.
The influx of high-purity heroin into the country, mostly from Colombia, is a major factor in the past decade's substance-abuse trends, says Carol Falkowski of the Hazelden Foundation, whose internationally renowned treatment clinics have hosted Breeders' guitarist Kelley Deal, among other performers. The purer blend can be snorted or smoked, so with injection no longer its only avenue into the body, the drug is losing its seedy aura.
"People who may have been deterred are now trying it because it can be put up your nose," Falkowski says. "It's become mainstream. That line in the sand that used to be drawn between heroin as a hard drug and all other drugs is gone."
Kinder agrees. "People think, 'Oh, if I'm smoking it I'm not really an addict, because I'm not jamming it in my vein,' " he says.
But heroin addiction, at any age and from any method of use, is a tremendously powerful thing, even after the addict stops using.
"It's harder to kick. It's right up there with coke," says Owens of MusiCares. "Physically, that's one thing. But mentally — the obsession, the thoughts, the problem still lies in the mind."
Marc Ramirez can be reached at 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com.