DRUGS AND ART

again wandering round the t'internet I found this article which I enjoyed immensely . . .credited correctly I hope but if the author wishes for me to take it down I will happily . . .

DRUGS AND ART - Writers

STEPHEN KING

In his memoir, On Writing, Stephen King talks about how deep he really went into addiction. And it wasn’t just cocaine—not long after he finished writing The Tommyknockers in 1986, his wife staged an intervention by pouring out a trashcan in front of him on the floor. It contained “beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil, even bottles of mouthwash.” He says he was so consistently wasted that he doesn’t remember writing Cujo.

Faced with an ultimatum from his wife (“fix it or get out”), Stephen King went to rehab, sobered up in the late ’80s, and is still writing today.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is probably most famous for his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and he’s widely considered one of the most influential poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. His poems are haunting, ethereal, and often delve into the twisted dreamscapes of the characters’ minds—and according to the people who study these things, a lot of that came from his lifelong addiction to opium. Coleridge himself even stated that the poem Kubla Khan was barely more than the description of “a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery.”

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Opium use in Coleridge’s time wasn’t exactly rare—laudanum, a tincture made of opium, was sold over the counter for anything from diarrhea to the flu. Coleridge first began using opium as a student, and built a tolerance against the drug for the next 40 years. By the time his addiction reached its peak, it’s estimated that he was going through two quarts of laudanum each week. To put that into perspective, the concentrations of laudanum in the 18th century had about 10 mg of morphine per milliliter, which translates to 18.9 grams of morphine that Coleridge guzzled down each week. It only takes 1.2 grams of morphine to kill a horse.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Somewhere between the ages of 13 and 15, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning began suffering from intense pain in her spine and neck. The doctors at the time couldn’t figure out what was causing the illness, so they turned to the Victorian-Era fallback: copious amounts of opium. The illness stayed with Browning for most of her life, and along with it, the drug.

Since she started using opium at such an early age, Browning remained weak and frail into adulthood, by which point she had made the switch from the watered-down laudanum tinctures to pure morphine. Hopelessly addicted by her twenties, Elizabeth Barrett Browning experienced the world through an opium haze for the vast majority of her life, to the point that it became just as essential to her existence as clothing. When she was 37, she wrote to her brother, “I . . . long to live by myself for three months in a forest of chestnuts and cedars, in an hourly succession of poetical paragraphs and morphine draughts.”

Browning took her last dose of morphine on June 29, 1861 and died with a smile on her face.

ALEISTER CROWLEY

the author of books with titles like Diary of a Drug Fiend and Enochian Sex Magick, it doesn’t take any real stretch of the imagination to conclude that Aleister Crowley may have had more than a passing interest in drugs. While his drug use is usually overshadowed by his other “achievements” (neoshamanism, occultism, anti-semitism, self-proclaimed sainthood), it was present at both the beginning and end of his life in the form of severe heroin addiction. 

In his book The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (A “hagiography” is the biography of a saint—always written by someone else. No real saint ever wrote an “autohagiography”), Crowley gives detailed descriptions of his lifelong experiences with heroin, morphine, mescaline, marijuana, cocaine, ether, and opium, many of which were used for “magickal” purposes.

Crowley died in 1947 from a respiratory infection and complications caused by heroin, which had been prescribed to treat his bronchitis in the first place. Ironically, the British have labeled him both “The Wickedest Man in the World” and No. 73 on the BBC List of 100 Greatest Britons.

WILLIAM SEWARD BURROUGHS

In contrast to other authors who have gone through drug addiction (indeed, in contrast to most of the people on this list) William S. Burroughs has a decidedly negative view of the relationship between drugs and writing. Where some people see inspiration or creative energy, Burroughs sees only depravity and sickness—which could be considered surprising since most of his novels are based on the 15 years he spent addicted to heroin. He’s even come out and said that he couldn’t really remember writing his most popular novel, Naked Lunch, and didn’t even know what the title meant for a while.

As a young man, Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936 and soon attempted to join the Navy during World War II. However, disappointed that he had been assigned to the infantry (he wanted to be an officer), he brought out medical papers claiming that he had a mental illness and was discharged. From there he moved to New York, got an apartment with Jack Kerouac, and started selling heroin. The next decade and a half of his life was dictated by drugs. He even moved to Mexico for several years because it was easier to find drugs there. This quote sums up his experiences pretty succinctly: “I have smoked junk, eaten it, sniffed it, injected it in vein-skin-muscle, inserted it in rectal suppositories. The needle is not important. Whether you sniff, it smoke it, eat it, or shove it up your ass, the result is the same.”

PHILIP K DICK

If there was an award for the most schizophrenically delusional writer in history, Philip K. Dick would have been one of the top contenders. His drug of choice—his “writer fuel”—was amphetamine: everything from crystal meth to dextroamphetamine (now used in Adderall). From nearly the beginning of his writing career, he became one of the many counterculture icons of the ’60s and ’70s and eventually turned his house into something of a commune for wayfaring drug addicts. Their behavior became part of the inspiration for the people in A Scanner Darkly.

Most of his books center around an inability to distinguish reality from psychosis: His science fiction came from a blurred line between his own reality and the thoughts parading through his head. He often raved about seeing a giant metallic face floating above him in the sky, and for a brief period he believed that he had become possessed by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. In 1971, Dick’s house was broken into by a burglar, and he spent the next 11 years spinning through conspiracy theories about who was behind it, alternating between secret police, the CIA, and fringe political groups. Eventually, he decided that he must have been the burglar: He believed that he broke into his own house after being brainwashed by the government. 

In 1982, at the age of 54, Dick suffered two consecutive strokes that left him brain-dead. He died in the hospital five days later. His novels have since become the source material for nearly 20 films, including Minority Report, Total Recall, and Blade Runner.

ANDREW HANDLEY

freelance writer and the owner of the sexy, sexy HandleyNation Content Service. When he's not writing he's usually hiking or rock climbing, or just enjoying the fresh North Carolina air.

Sent from my iPad