By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

The prevailing narrative about heroin is that it is a substance defined exclusively by tragedy. This narrative has come to taint the legacy of everyone who has ever had anything to do with it and in few cases has that narrative distorted the truth more severely than with the story of Kurt Cobain. The commonly accepted People Magazine bio tells us that Kurt was an addict and his addiction destroyed him. The truth is that Kurt suffered from chronic stomach pain and heroin was literally the only thing that made his existence tolerable. Because of his broken childhood Kurt feared nothing more than rejection and when his friends and family told him that he could either give up the only thing that soothed him or be abandoned, Kurt chose to kill himself. Heroin didn’t kill Kurt Cobain. Courtney Love didn’t kill Kurt Cobain. Forced sobriety killed Kurt Cobain. Courtney said as much during the reading of Kurt’s suicide note when she lamented that they should have just let him have the one thing that took the pain away even if it only gave him a few more years but it actually could have given him a lot more than that. What Kurt’s loved ones should have done was help him to treat himself with opioids responsibly. Kurt himself actually made this observation at his intervention when he brought up the possibility of living like his hero William Burroughs who would go to outlive Kurt and die a dope fiend at a ripe old age. No one listened of course because Kurt Cobain, the greatest musician of his generation, was just a junkie. And virtually no one learned a goddamn thing from his death because American culture embraces a bigoted caste system of acceptable toxicity that allowed open drunks like Kris Novoselic and Dave Grohl to treat their friend like trash because he didn’t obliterate himself properly. The only person who seemed to get it was Courtney Love who still refuses to take part in interventions because ganging up on people you love when they are at their most vulnerable is abusive.