Everyone knows drugs are bad…unless you are a musician, in which case they seem to be a job requirement. Well, It turns out drugs aren’t just for Jazz Musicians and tortured comedians. History is full of movers and shakers who have tapped into nature and pharmaceuticals to spur their genius.
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that the father of psychoanalysis loved cocaine. One could easily imagine Freud pacing around his office at 3am, saying shit like, “Man, what if our brains are like, like, doing shit all the time without us even knowing it? That would explain so much. I gotta do some research on that. Also, I bet like…little babies sucking on their mom’s tits, you know, like, I totally bet kids want to fuck their moms,” and his research assistant is over in the corner rubbing blow on his gums going, “Fuck yeah dude. That makes perfect sense. We should probably research a few more grams of this stuff. You know, for science.” Freud loved his cocaine so much he even published a paper about nose candy called “Uber Coca.” Freud discovered cocaine after a pharmaceutical company paid him $24 to endorse their new wonder drug.
Most people know that Hitler’s five hour, frenzied speeches were fueled by his amphetamine addiction, but did you also know his arch nemesis Winston Churchill was staying up all night obsessing over maps and shit while jacked up on meth too? There ain’t much time to sleep when you have a world war to win. Winston Churchill didn’t just beat Hitler at war, he also beat him and getting fucked up. Churchill used his legendary thirst for booze to wash down handfuls of barbiturates. You have to wonder if maybe the war might have ended sooner if the guys planning it weren’t Blitzkrieged out of their minds.
Over the course of Holmes’s career, Watson regularly rode his ass about filling his iconic calabash pipe with cocaine, that is, when he wasn’t just straight up injecting it. You know who else smokes cocaine? Crackheads. I know Sherlock is a fictional character but it is funny that the most famous super cop in literary history was a fucking crack head. maybe that's why they picked Robert Downey Jr. to play him.
Next time you watch A Christmas Carol, remember the guy who wrote it was drooling on his writing desk, high as fuck. His drug of choice was Laudanum, a popular cough syrup made from opium derivatives like morphine and codeine. A hundred and fifty years before D.J. Screw made it cool Charles Dickens was sippin on some Syzzurp!
Unless you are a math nerd you probably haven’t heard about Paul Erdos. He was a Hungarian mathematician who published around 1500 mathematical papers, which by my calculations is a lot. The only thing Erdos loved more than math was meth. He was so bad on the stuff one of his friends bet him $500 that he couldn’t go a month without Breaking Bad. Erdos won the bet, scolded his friend for setting mathematics back a month, and promptly went back to staying up for days on end and freaking out that the cops were outside.
Hollywood executives were pieces of shit long before Harvey Weinstein started jerking off on young actresses. To keep up with brutal shooting schedules, studios would give amphetamine pills to Garland to keep her going and barbiturates at night to get her to sleep. After getting cast as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, executives complained that Garland was too fat and made her take more pills to cut weight. This lead to a lifetime of drug abuse, which included two suicide attempts, and an accidental overdose of barbiturates that killed her.
When he wrote A Brave New World, Huxley was living in Italy. Six years later he moved to Hollywood and started experimenting with psychedelics like mescaline and acid. He loved tripping so much he had his wife inject him with LSD while he was on his deathbed.