The self-induced junk overdose of Darby Crash has finally brought to light the presence that heroin has become in the L.A. music scene. To jaded New Yorkers accustomed to daily dealings with junkies on the street, this probably doesn't mean a thing. After all, the Velvet Underground were singing about it when the east coast was still starry-eyed with flower power, especially the pot-smoking, acid-dropping Sunset Strip scene, which was about as far from "Waiting for My Man" as you could get.

"Scoring," nodding out," "doing cottons," - it all seems slightly incongruous under the L.A. ozone layer. this is a physical city of sunny isolation - you don't push up against people, you tailgate them. And somehow heroin has always seemed more of an inner-city drug, not the kind of thing that surfers and Beverly Hills rich kids would get excited about. But there's always been a small smack underground in the middle of this vast sprawl. In the forties, there was a big L.A. be-bop scene, certainly no stranger to "muggles" and "horse," and jazz stars like Billie Holiday spent many a junked-out gloomy Sunday in old L.A. the high school kids of the Fifties might have preferred, bennies or reds, and the beatniks of Venice might have been more interested in pot, but to a small crowd of disaffected Hollywood types, heroin was as hip as hanging around Lenny Bruce.

Then the Sixties hit, and the drug basically did not fit in with the lifestyle of the kids hanging out at Pandora's Box the Sea Witch, It's Boss, and Bido Lito. At least not on the surface. It seemed to be all acid and weed, with crystal meth snaking its way down from the Haight-Ashbury. But smack was still there, the final release and the final disaster for original L.A. bands like Love, who disintegrated primarily due to some of the members' acquired habits. Still, to most of the hippies, heroin was definitely not "groovy."

The beginning of the Seventies saw a lot of speed and acid casualties. It also saw the rise of cocaine to a bourgeois plaything. To many of the glitter types who frequented Rodney's disco it was nothing to consume up to six quaaludes per night. It was Rorer-714, Suzi Quatro and the Dolls, but it wasn't smack.

The same applied to the initial stirrings of what is now the L.A. punk explosion. The first days of the Masque found a tiny in-crowd smashed to the gills on alcohol, with many converted glitter types still popping those 'ludes as they ratted out their now spikey haircuts. There were speed freaks lurking in corners, and pot was disdainfully dismissed as a "hippie" drug. Heroin was some sort of distant myth. There were rumors about the big San Francisco band of the time being junkies, but nobody in L.A. liked that band anyway and their rumored dope habits were just another example of their stupidity.

The real start of the junk scene (the start of many scenes for that matter) came in a building known as the Canterbury. Once a posh Hollywood apartment complex, famed for the "Blue Dahlia" murder of the Forties, the Canterbury had become a seedy run-down, three-story dive where the hallways smelled of piss and the residents included hippie refugees from halfway houses, black pimps, "bag" men, and minority families of six or eight crammed into single rooms.

But it was close to the Masque, the center of the Hollywood in-crowd/punk scene, and one night dozens of Masque patrons attended a party in the Canterbury. Soon after, scores of punks moved in: it was cheap, they would all know each other, and the place would parallel New York's Chelsea Hotel in the Sixties. Members of the Screamers, Weirdos, Germs, Bags, Deadbeats, and other seminal bands resided there. The Go-Gos were formed there. And junk was introduced there.

One of the first to bring it on the scene was a guy I'll call Bad Jack. Jack was one of the original faces not only on the L.A. scene but the New York one he'd come from, where he'd hung out doing "Chinese Rock" with several members of now-prominent groups. Though he didn't have a junk habit, Jack had no qualms about an occasional high with good friends - he laughingly referred to it as "intellectual junkism." He only shared his kicks with a small, close-knit group of punk writers, graphic artists and scenesters, but since this was the Canterbury everybody could sense what everybody else was doing.

Around the same time as Jack and his friends were hitting up, four of the better-known San Francisco bands came down to do a "Mabuhay Presents" weekend show at the whisky. What the lead singer of one group presented was a thorough instruction in the use of needles. the group was not a big success, but the hypos were.

One of Jack's smack gang took to playing bass in a band we'll call the Madmen, who quickly acquired a reputation as a "junkie" band, sort of a Heartbreakers West. In their wake came other "Hollywood heroin" bands; instead of turning people off, these groups exuded a strange, dark, romantic allure, as though they were the last complete rebels. their rise neatly coincided with the death of Sid Vicious, and the ludicrous myth of heroin as some kind of final solution became ingrained in the naive imaginations of many punks. It was nothing for someone like Darby Crash to try heroin, since his reputation rested on his willingness to take everything to extremes - there were rumors that if he were really desperate, he would mix it with rain water. The last taboo was no taboo at all.

And if there wasn't any China White or Mexican Mud or Iranian dope to be found, there was always synthetic morphine or Dilaudids or liquid Talwyn. Bad Jack recalls: "The most addictive thing I've ever done is a Dilaudid... I don't know.... All these years, I've taken these kinds of drugs. I didn't know I was getting a jones until I started D's. It becomes an immediate habit."

Bear in mind that narcotics use was still not a widespread phenomena, and that many people were totally innocent of what was going on. but every hard-core radical punk band in the Hollywood scene has now had a minor brush with either smack or the people who use it. Junk has begun to cross all barriers; all-girl groups, power-pop ensembles, art bands, dippy new wavers, heavy metal punks, dark street poets - they've all had their fling with the thing. Some got habits, some got sick and gave up, some are now on methadone maintenance, and some still think it's a sick way of being glamorous. Just like New York, maybe, but for L.A. it's a first.

And though its an expensive high ranging from $25-50 (drugs in L.A. generally being the most expensive in the country), heroin is actually becoming cheaper. There's a new influx of suburban and beach punks with middle-class bucks to throw around, and they're not afraid to try needles "like Sid did." Or like Darby....

Though heroin is on the upswing, the real big drug of the moment is crystal meth. It's especially popular with the skinheads, who go right from a rush on powdered amphetamine to slamming around on the dance floor. It's a natural high for he fuck-everything scene that the beach punk thing has become. (At a recent show with my own band, the Boneheads, I walked into an equipment area to find two adolescents trying to shoot up. Not wanting to watch inexperienced kids give themselves self-induced abscesses, I split, only to return twenty minutes later to a room filled with perhaps 25 people waiting to use the kits. (This was a generally unheard-of social activity in L.A. only two years ago.)