Matt Yglesias just made a decent point on Twitter, that mid-90s pop culture was very fixated on heroin addiction, but looking at records in hindsight that was not a particular peak of the drug, what gives?

Possibilities I think of:

• Heroin use was notable for not going down, as the holdover users from the 60s and 70s faded a new young wave of users took it up, with higher visibility (both in terms of exhibition and the fact that they hadn’t been weeded down to the ones that could maintain for decades without ODing yet)
• The face of heroin was more white than before - remember it used to be associated with jazz musicians, and the 70s wave was the backdrop to most classic blaxploitation.
• It was an urban thing and cities were being remythologized as white flight began to reverse
• It was an urban thing and so white people exposed to it enough to represent it were disproportionately towards the top of a culture transmission hierarchy, compare the lack of representation of the spread of oxycontin and then heroin among the rural white working poor
• The spread of oxycontin and then heroin among the rural white working poor has so swamped the scale of previous use that we no longer appreciate an actual phenomenon in the 90s
• Amidst urban decay and the War on Drugs, tragic drug addiction had become an important theme in American culture and heroin was at least a way you could tell white-people stories about that, better than caffeine pills on Saved By The Bell?
• Like with “grunge”, people - either end-user audiences or some gatekeeper class - just preferred culture steeped in themes of languor and tragic decay and preferentially sought it out

Thoughts? More?