The controversy around the HBO documentary “Heroin: Cape Cod, U.S.A.” seems to involve an unnecessary competition between two quite distinct issues. One: there is currently a crisis of addiction caused apparently by overprescription of painkillers and the availability of cheap heroin. Two: some people are much more susceptible to opioid addiction than others.
Both are true. According to another documentary on the epidemic, “The Heroin Trail” , four out of five heroin addicts started with painkillers. On the other hand, it is “relatively rare” for those prescribed painkillers to become addicted to heroin.
The HBO film has been defended with the “good because it gets people talking” defense. Yes, getting people talking is important. But what people say when they talk is important; and what the movie says about addiction, beyond that it is here and is wrecking lives, is important.
A few days after seeing the HBO film I attended a sold-out viewing of another movie about heroin, “Janis: Little Girl Blue,” about Janis Joplin’s famously self-destructive life in which heroin figured large and which ended in an overdose . The contrast between the two films is instructive.
The Janis movie says something quite different about heroin addiction.
The HBO film, in the interest of making the point that addiction can happen to anyone, anywhere (even here on beautiful Cape Cod), deemphasizes environmental and psychological differences amongst people. Thus when the one addict asks plaintively why he is addicted, when most of his friends are not, the film is unprepared to respond. (It can happen to anyone, anywhere.)
The Joplin biopic, on the other hand, clearly suggests that the famous singer had an emotional, psychological makeup that made her susceptible to addiction. That, at least, is the take of virtually all those friends and co-workers interviewed, many of them users of a variety of drugs themselves in that druggy time and place (1960s, BayArea). In Janis especially, there was a “void” (insecurity, lack of love, lack of something that many others have) that she needed to fill. If not with adulation from an audience, then with heroin.
Just having what looks to the world like a “life,” “something going for you,” whether being a popular athlete in school or having a voice that makes you a pop music icon—which you might think would fill anyone’s void—doesn’t necessarily.
The tragic irony in Janis’ case is in how much that void seems built into her art, what she did with her voice, that signature bluesy scream of hers that she became famous and treasured for. (The same could be said of Jimi Hendrix, who died of an overdose just a couple of weeks before Janis in 1970.)
The point in making this distinction between addictive and less addictive is not to make us feel complacent about the epidemic (because most of us are not going to get addicted). The point is to focus on understanding and treating what afflicts the most susceptible.
“The Heroin Trail”(available on YouTube) features an addict and his family in rural Vermont, making much the same ironic use of the scenic, outdoorsy image of our neighbor state as the HBO documentary makes of beautiful Cape Cod. It also takes us to the source of the drugs in Columbia and Mexico, interviewing the poor farmers who (especially when encouraged by drug cartels) find raising poppies more profitable than other crops. The people at both ends of the trail are, the narrator points out, tragically dependent in their different ways on the drug.
As the narrator of “The Heroin Trail” says toward the end, despite our best efforts, the flow of heroin from south of the border (and the removal of temptation) is not likely to stop anytime soon. So understanding that void, versions of which many of us carry around and need to try to fill with this or that, remains an important, perhaps the most important, emphasis.
No Comments