New Books In Public Policy

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were from the soft parade of L.A….); they hung out with Andy Warhol (The Beatles hung out with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi…); they had a female drummer (The Grateful Dead had two drummers, but that still didn’t help…); and, of course, they did heroin. Or at least they wrote a famous song about it. We did not do heroin, but we thought that those who did–like Lou Reed and the rest–were hipper than hip. I imagine we would have done it if there had been any around (thank God for small favors). We thought we had discovered something new. But as Eric C. Schneider points out in his marvelous Smack: Heroin and the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), the conjunction of music, heroin, and cool was hardly an invention of my generation. The three came together in the