Paranoia from top to bottom. Or sad truth?

In today's excerpt - Iggy Pop led a hard core punk band called the Stooges that had - among many other now legendary appearances - performed outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and was closely associated with the violence there. The group was heavily into marijuana, but with the crackdown on marijuana that came during that period, heroin became easier to obtain and thus the group's drug of choice. In the paranoid culture of the time, the band viewed it as a conspiracy of the U.S. government. Here band members Iggy Pop and Ron Asheton, along with MC5 drummer and sometime collaborator Dennis Thompson, discuss their experience with heroin:

  

DENNIS THOMPSON: Nixon and the smart boys in the green room back in the brain trust sat down and said, "Here's the easiest way to handle this damn thing. Just take away their party favors."

The government figured it out. It was obvious. "These people do pot and hash and psychedelics and then they get revolutionary, and they come up with all these new ideas like 'Hey let's change this world. And let's eliminate these fascist politicians!'

"Well, the smartest thing to do is give them what's been in the ghettos for a long time because that's been working pretty good there." All of a sudden all you can find anywhere you go is heroin. It's cheap, and there it is.

Author: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain      
Title: Please Kill Me
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 1996 by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
Pages: 68, 74, 76-77