Dawn Holliday, who books Boz Scaggs' San Francisco nightclub Slim's, where Oscar worked as a sound technician, knows the suburban heroin explosion with painful intimacy. Holliday's younger brother, Norman, lived in Marin and overdosed on heroin at the 16th and Mission BART Station several years ago. He was resuscitated after a passer-by noticed him turning blue and called 911. Norman moved to upstate New York, telling his sister he couldn't get clean in San Francisco. They started smoking it, then shooting it.
Police say the figure only reflects a fraction of what is really out there.
One every three days, double the rate of the early '90s, and far more than from any other drug. However, tracing heroin's specific injection into the lives of the rich or even the merely comfortable is much harder. Those with enough money tend to take their kids to private doctors when they overdose, keeping them off the public medical records. Wave or no wave, it's not like heroin ever really went away. The first big heroin epidemic swept San Francisco in the late 1960s and early '70s, and others have ebbed and flowed like a dirty tide ever since, with a hard core of steady users remaining no matter what.