History is full of movers and shakers who couldn't stop moving and shaking. Here are a few people who changed the world...while high as a kite.
Coca-Cola wasn’t the only company to put cocaine in their drinks to keep people thirsty at all costs. Vin Mariana was a French wine infused with coca leaves. Unlike Coca-Cola, Vin Mariani’s ethanol content not only got you drunk but it also extracted the active ingredients in cocaine from the coca. The cocaine would keep you awake while the ethanol got you blackout drunk. Vin Mariani might have been a fancy French Wine but there’s no amount of lipstick you can put on a pig before you fuck it that makes it kosher. It was basically the Four Loco of the 1860’s.
Ole’ Tommy Edison was a huge fan of the stuff. This makes sense because the two things coke-heads are best at are lying and stealing, which is what Edison’s whole empire was built on. Modern coke fiends will steal your stereo and lie about it. Shit, Thomas Edison stole the patent for the stereo and lied about it.
Other notable fans of cocaine happy hour at Applebee’s was Ulysses S. Grant and Pope Saint Pious X. Pope Leo the XIII loved the shit so much he awarded the wine maker the Vatican Gold Medal and even appeared in ads for the wine.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Actually he didn’t say that. He said something kinda similar but it was about wine. Damn you internet. This is why we can’t have nice quotes. Another famous quote from Benjamin Franklin that you shouldn’t bother looking up is, “Hey Debby, I can’t drive. Can you run to the store and get me some Sprite and more of that opium cough syrup I’ve been hopelessly addicted to for years… and a pack of Newports?”
Franklin is famous for being a forward thinker who was a bit eccentric. He loved to take “air baths,” which was his excuse for hanging out on the back porch getting some sun on his twigs and berries, he wanted the national bird to be the turkey instead of the bald eagle, and he flew a kite in the rain. He didn’t actually fly a kite in the rain to discover electricity but apparently, he was weird enough that everyone believed it. If this behavior is the mark of an eccentric genius, Ozzy Osborne is going to cure cancer. Next time your parents tell you drugs will ruin your life just point to the picture on a hundred dollar bill, roll it up, and use it to snort a line.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was about a guy who does some white powder and turns into an asshole. Can you guess what Robert Louis Stevenson’s favorite drug was? If you guessed cocaine, give yourself a gold star. Stevenson got jacked up on blow and wrote Dr. Jekyll in one weekend. After showing the manuscript to his wife she declared it to be too scary for public consumption and threw it into the fireplace. 1886 that was legal grounds for an ass whooping but ole’ RLS said, “Bitch, I can be pettier than thee!” snorted another fat rail and wrote the whole goddamn thing over again.
Nietzsche is the patron saint of philosophers every hipster owns a book by but never bothered to read. He had a distinguished career as a professor, writer, army medic, and philosopher. He even coined the term “Superman.” He was also a hopeless drug addict. Nietzsche’s rabbit hole of drug use started early thanks to chronic migraines. As the son of a minister, Nietzsche studied theology to follow in his father’s footsteps. Eventually, he decided God was stupid and switched to philology.
While in University Nietzsche joined a fraternal club called “The Wild Clique” (can’t make that shit up). The clubs major preoccupations were with smoking, drinking, and fucking off. Hangovers can be brutal for people with chronic migraines so Nietzsche swore off alcohol for the latter part of his life. He didn’t have any trouble passing out every night thanks to his insatiable appetite for potassium bromide and chloral hydrate, an anticonvulsant and a psychedelic sleeping medicine, both of which are mostly used on animals. A horseback riding accident in the military gave him a taste for morphine. He also enjoyed huffing chlorophyll. After receiving an honorary doctorate degree he used the title of “doctor” to write himself prescriptions.
When Jefferson wasn’t busy banging the help or being president he was getting fucked up on Laudanum. Jefferson had a chronic diarrhea problem that might have been diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome if he’d have been born a few hundred years later. Laudanum is an opium-based cough syrup, which basically means heroin. Heroin dulls all your nerve endings, which is why most painkillers are made from opioids. A side effect of this is it dulls the nerve endings in your butthole that tell you it’s time to take a shit, causing constipation. Consequently, everything gets so backed up that heroin addicts sometimes have to have surgery because their guts are so full of compacted dookie they could die.
Not being the type of guy to do anything half-assed, Jefferson found a recipe for laudanum and started brewing the stuff at home so he wouldn’t have to sit at his dealer’s house for three hours while the guy sat there swearing the dope was gonna get there any time now. Jefferson had so many poppy plants growing on his plantation that they continued to thrive until 1992 when caretakers decided having an opium field growing at a national monument might not be a good idea.
If you haven’t noticed by now, Laudanum was the “It” drug in America for a good chunk of history. Imagine if you could pop down to the pharmacy and score some heroin right now. Walgreens stock would be worth more than Google. Laudanum addiction was pretty common back then, and people didn’t raise much fuss about it, presumably because everyone was getting fucked up on the stuff. The thing that sets Mary Todd Lincoln apart is she was the Courtney Love of first ladies.
Lincoln started out abusing paregoric, which is a children’s version of Laudanum for migraines and childbirth, and later switched to adult strength Laudanum. Apparently, her whole family liked to get lit. After her maid told her to chill out she said, “If paregoric were poison, the Todd family would be dead years ago…We were raised on it.” It wasn’t an unusual occurrence for Mary to go to the store, buy a bottle of laudanum, chug it on the side of the road, and go back for another. She’d do weird shit like walk around with 50k worth of government bonds sewn into her undergarments. Mary had a history of erratic behavior and violence while twisted on opium. Her family tried to make her go to rehab but she said, “No, no, no.” Then she ran down to a pharmacy and ordered enough laudanum to kill herself. The pharmacist had been warned about her earlier so he gave her a placebo. Somehow she made it to the ripe old age of 63 before her hard-partying finally did her in.