Background
At the time during which heroin chic emerged, the popular image of heroin was changing for several reasons. The price of heroin had decreased, and its purity had increased dramatically. In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic had made injecting heroin with unclean needles increasingly risky. Available heroin had become more pure, and inhalation became a more common mode of heroin use.
These changes decreased the stigma surrounding the drug, allowing heroin to find a new market among the middle-class and the wealthy, in contrast to its previous base of the poor and marginalized. Heroin infiltrated pop culture through attention brought to addictions in the early 1990s. In film, the heroin chic trend in fashion coincided with a string of movies in the mid‑1990s—such as The Basketball Diaries, Trainspotting, Permanent Midnight, and Pulp Fiction—that examined heroin use and drug culture.
Read more about this topic: Heroin Chic
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