well, he often has characters addicted to drugs... see for instance the "wiz" Mona's hooked on in MLO or even going back to Case's addiction to uppers in Neuromancer... heroin is only mentioned in passing in Spook Country - I'd say that, if anything, he likes to have characters that are substance abusers in general, as most of his books have people hooked on one thing or another. part of the "street" thing he's going for, I'd wager. and being that many people living at the street level are in fact hooked on drugs, I'd say it's appropriate, personally.

That's kind of what's interesting about this one though. His earlier books were so ultra-stylish, and the main characters were either ultra-hip marginal street types or slightly samaged superstars (except Marly maybe, who got recycled as a personality into both Cayce and Hollis. But even Cayce is pretty uber-hip.

Gibson is older, and so is Hollis--once famous, but also past all that, and just trying to make a living. So it's as if the band backstory was just kind of you know, back then when we were all still cool, blahblahblah.

Which I liked, but also left me feeling ultimately kind of post-cool too, in a way that very nearly left me cold.