by Dennis Cooper

About the author: Dennis Cooper is a contributing editor of SPIN, a monthly music magazine.

When an Alice In Chains video comes on MTV, most of us either crank the volume, or immediately change channels. But heroin addicts and struggling former addicts hear something in Layne Staley’s grade-school junkie poetry that we can’t: a kind of siren. As someone who has had several close friends who were strung out on heroin in the past two years, I think I have a sense of how this private call-and-response works, even if I can’t understand the mechanisms. According to my friends, just the mention of the word “heroin” in a lyric, or a photograph of a hypodermic on a CD cover, or the sight of...