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LIST 1

39 Famous People Who Used Drugs

Maybe the title of this list should be “39 Famous but Unexpected People Who Took Drugs,” because the idea is not to document every well-known person who smoked pot or popped a pill. Instead, the list concerns famous figures whose usage might be somewhat surprising to the average person (of course, no readers of this book are merely average, but you know what I mean!). We won't look at people who were expected to do drugs, which means you won't read about anybody from the Beat movement or the Counterculture, nor any rock or jazz musicians. Instead, we'll focus on scientists, old-school literary giants, Nobel laureates, legendary actors, physicians (and a nurse), etc. These are the people you probably read about in school or college, but you didn't hear about their fondness for opium, LSD, hash, laughing gas, and other such substances.

Mathematician Ralph Abraham—the primary developer of chaos theory—said in a 1991 interview:

In the 1960s a lot of people on the frontiers of math experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community.

To be creative in mathematics you have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate. And mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of consciousness.

Social reformer, founder of Hull House, and Nobel laureate Jane Addams wrote that she and some friends took opium once while in seminary-college. “We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during the entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy.”

Little woman Louisa May Alcott was addicted to morphine.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and philosopher, took opium.

Honoré de Balzac, one of France's literary giants, smoked hash at least once.

Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning suffered from numerous physical maladies and was no stranger to the use of opiates. When she and Robert Browning became involved, she was heavily addicted to laudanum (a tincture of opium in alcohol), morphine, and her own special brew, a mixture of morphine and ether. With his help, she was able to gradually reduce her intake, but because of an abscess on her lung, her doctor increased her dosage of morphine, which is probably what killed her. Thus, much of Elizabeth's verse—including all of her immortal love poems to Robert—were written while opium coursed through her veins.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic poet, gave us what is probably the most well-known piece of literature written while tripping. After taking two grains of opium and falling into a hazy state of mind in 1797, Coleridge saw vivid images with a corresponding poem of 200 to 300 lines. Coming out of his reverie, he wrote—or perhaps transcribed—54 lines that became the classic poem “Kubla Khan.” At that moment, though, “a visitor on business” from a nearby town knocked on the poet's door. Unfortunately for literature, Coleridge answered his visitor. By the time the salesman left over an hour later, the images and poem had fled Coleridge, except for a few scattered lines. He tried many times to retrieve the lost portion of the poem but never could. (It should be noted that some experts think this account is bogus, saying that “Kubla Khan” was written like any other poem, though perhaps based on images Coleridge saw while tripping.)

Around this time (the final years of the 1700s), the poet described laudanum as taking him to “a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains, & flowers & trees, in the very heart of a waste of Sands!” The liquid opium would let him “float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos.”

But Coleridge soon changed his tune when he became addicted to the milk of paradise, taking huge doses of laudanum every day by 1801. In letters written in May 1814, he speaks of “this wicked direful practice of taking Opium or Laudanum” and refers to the tincture as a “free-agency-annihilating Poison.” At this time, he tried going cold turkey, but he went through sheer hell and was put on a suicide watch (all sharp objects were removed and someone stayed with him 24 hours a day). He never completely kicked the habit and used small doses for the rest of his life.

Opium may have been Coleridge's master, but his play pals included ether, hash, henbane, and belladonna.

Philip K. Dick was a pulp sci-fi writer whose dystopian stories of government-corporate-media control, strange drugs, and the subjective natures of reality and identity have achieved cult, even classic, status. Nine of his works have been made into movies, most notably, “Minority Report,” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner), and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (turned into the film Total Recall).

Throughout most of his writing years, Dick was fuelled by amphetamines, which allowed him to crank out 60 pages a day. His need for speed undoubtedly contributed to his paranoia, visions, and breaks with reality.

Dick also dropped acid, although he said it didn't contribute to the hallucinatory quality of his work, especially since much of it was written before he took LSD. When asked if one of his stories was written while he was high, he replied: “That really is not true. First of all, you can't write anything when you're on acid. I did one page once while on an acid trip, but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit, and there's not much market for that.” Summing up his experiences in 1974, he said: “All I ever found out about acid was that I was where I wanted to get out of fast. It didn't seem more real than anything else; it just seemed more awful.”

Charles Dickens—Victorian England's greatest novelist—drank quite a bit of laudanum to help him sleep and to ease a painful foot condition.

In 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis hurled a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. He and his girlfriend had dropped acid the night before. Ellis got up around nine or ten and downed another half a tab. Looking at a newspaper, his girlfriend informed him that he was supposed to pitch in a little while, which was news to him. At the clubhouse, Ellis took Dexamyl and Benzedrine to counter the acid. The coauthor of his autobiography, Donald Hall, later admitted that he and Ellis bowdlerized this story. Instead of “taking tabs,” the pitcher was said to have drunk screwdrivers the night before.

Physician Havelock Ellis, a pioneer of sexual studies in the late 1800s up to the 1930s, was a devotee of mescal. Of his first trip, he wrote:

I was further impressed, not only by the brilliance, delicacy, and variety of the colours, but even more by their lovely and various textures; fibrous, woven, polished, glowing, dull-veined, semitransparent. The glowing effects, as of jewels and the fibrous, as of insect's wings, being perhaps the most prevalent.

In Opium: A History, Martin Booth writes that Benjamin Franklin “was almost certainly addicted to opium in his declining years.”

In his first paper of several on the subject, “On Coca”—which in 1884 simultaneously helped make Sigmund Freud's name and introduce the general populace to coke—the father of psychoanalysis writes: “I have tested this effect of coca, which wards off hunger, sleep, and fatigue, and steels one to intellectual effort, some dozen times upon myself…” He elaborates:

A few minutes after taking cocaine, one experiences a certain exhilaration and feeling of lightness. One feels a certain furriness on the lips and palate, followed by a feeling of warmth in the same areas; if one now drinks cold water, it feels warm on the lips and cold in the throat. One other occasions the predominant feeling is a rather pleasant coolness in the mouth and throat.

During this first trial I experienced a short period of toxic effects, which did not recur in subsequent experiments. Breathing became slower and deeper and I felt tired and sleepy; I yawned frequently and felt somewhat dull. After a few minutes the actual cocaine euphoria began, introduced by repeated cooling eructation. Immediately after taking the cocaine I noticed a slight slackening of the pulse and later a moderate increase.

From our current perspective, it's wince-inducing to read this soon-to-be-eminent physician making guesses that are 100 percent wrong: “It seems probable, in the light of reports which I shall refer to later, that coca, if used protractedly but in moderation, is not detrimental to the body.” And this clunker: “I have the impression that protracted use of coca can lead to a lasting improvement [in the user's mental powers]…”

Cocaine's addictive properties soon became apparent to the world at large, but Freud was gung-ho for blow for several years. Finally he quit lauding it and using it.

King George IV believed that laudanum was a cure for his hangovers.

Like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould became famous as a superb popularizer of science, in this case evolutionary biology, with his books The Mismeasure of Man and The Panda's Thumb, among others. Gould developed a cancer known as abdominal mesothelioma, and his chemotherapy gave him horrendous nausea that couldn't be tamed by any medications. As a last resort, he tried pot:

Marihuana worked like a charm. I disliked the “side effect” of mental blurring (the “main effect” for recreational users), but the sheer bliss of not experiencing nausea—and then not having to fear it for all the days intervening between treatments—was the greatest boost I received in all my years of treatment, and surely had a most important effect upon my eventual cure. It is beyond my comprehension—and I fancy I am able to comprehend a lot, including much nonsense—that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simply because others use it for different purposes.

One of the greatest idols of the silver screen, Cary Grant starred in many classic films, including North by Northwest, An Affair to Remember, Notorious, Arsenic and Old Lace, Gunga Din, and Monkey Business. Starting in the late 1950s, Grant dropped LSD during 100 therapy sessions with pioneering shrinks Dr. Mortimer Hartmann and Dr. Oscar Janiger. In CG: A Touch of Elegance, the matinee idol is quoted from that time period:

I have been born again. I have just been through a psychiatric experience that has completely changed me. It was horrendous. I had to face things about myself which I never admitted, which I didn't know were there. Now I know that I hurt every woman I loved. I was an utter fake, a self-opinionated boor, a know-all who knew very little.

Once you realize that you have all things inside you, love and hate alike, and you learn to accept them, then you can use your love to exhaust your hate. That power is inside you, but it can be assimilated into your power to love. You can relax. Then you can do more than you ever dreamed you could do. I found I was hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities. I had to get rid of them layer by layer. That moment when your conscious meets your subconscious is a helluva wrench. You feel the whole top of your head is lifting off.

Also in CG, Grant says:

The experience was just like being born the first time; I imagined all the blood and urine, and I emerged with the flush of birth. It was absolute release. You are still able to feed yourself, of course, drive your car, that kind of thing, but you've lost a lot of the tension.

It releases inhibition. You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream I shit all over the rug and shit all over the floor. Another time I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.

In his short autobiography, Grant wrote: “The shock of each revelation brings with it an anguish of sadness for what was not known before in the wasted years of ignorance and, at the same time, an ecstasy of joy at being freed from the shackles of such ignorance.” When he was 70 years old, he told his former flame Maureen Donaldson: “But you don't understand. LSD is a chemical, not a drug. People who take drugs are trying to escape from their lives. LSD is a hallucinogen, and people who take it are trying to look within their lives. That's what I did.”

Novelist Graham Greene (The Quiet American) smoked opium in dens throughout Southeast Asia

Hippocrates, the Greek doctor considered the founder of Western medicine, recommended opium for numerous complaints.

Ask any first-year psychology student about William James, and you'll find out that he's a giant in the field, the psychologist who formed the school of thought called functionalism. Ask any first-year philosophy student about William James, and you'll find out that he's a giant in the field, the philosopher who formed the school of thought called Pragmatism. What you're less likely to hear is that he was a user of mind-altering drugs who penned the seminal work on altered states of consciousness—Varieties of Religious Experience. Nitrous oxide was his substance of choice. From the first time James inhaled it, his thinking was changed and he was set on his path. As he wrote in Varieties:

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

About his encounters with laughing gas, he also wrote:

Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.

James also took peyote, which didn't do much for him, and chloral hydrate, the hypnotic that puts the knock-out in a Mickey Finn.

Mitch Kapor—pioneering software developer (Lotus 1-2-3), founder of Lotus Development, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—told the Buddhist magazine Tricycle:

I had gotten to college in the 60's and started experimenting with marijuana and psychedelics, fairly heavily. I had some distressing experiences with LSD. Bad trips. So I stopped doing drugs and then started getting acid flashbacks. I decided to give meditation a serious try to see if that could have some calming effect. I got hooked in to TM and eventually made the decision to go through advanced training to become an initiator, an instructor.

Famed comedian Groucho Marx first took LSD in 1967 or 1968 with counterculture icon Paul Krassner. Soon after, Marx smoked pot with extras on the set of the all-star comedy Skidoo, and he even tokes a little on-screen. Krassner relates the following exchange:

I said to him, “My mother once told me she was concerned that LSD would lead to marijuana.”

Groucho replied, “Your mother was right.”

Opiate historian Barbara Hodgson says of Guy de Maupassant, France's greatest writer of short stories: “Much of the ill health that plagued him through his adult years could be blamed on syphilis, against which he tried ether, hashish, cocaine and morphine.”

Weir Mitchell—the most illustrious neurologist of his day (a nineteenth-century Oliver Sacks), who also wrote popular novels and short stories and was friends with Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and other notables—seems to be the first Westerner to try peyote and write about his experiences:

Stars, delicate floating films of colour, then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view, as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow in a sparkling river before my eyes; Zigzag lines of very bright colours…

Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method for studying DNA molecules. In his autobiography, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Mullis describes the first time he smoked a joint, in 1966 when he was attending grad school: “I looked at Richards, my wife, with new eyes.

She was the same Richards, but not to me. I grabbed her in a primitive way, rolled her onto our enhanced bed, and felt the surging power of bliss.”

The next week, Mullis dropped acid with a friend to guide him. At that point, the “double-domed 1000-microgram Owsley” he took was legal.

I started laughing. I got up from the table and realized, on the way to the couch, that everything I knew was based on a false premise. I fell down through the couch into another world….

I wasn't afraid. I wasn't anything. I noticed that time did not extend smoothly—that it was punctuated by moments—and I fell down into a crack between two moments and was gone….

I felt like I was everywhere. I was thrilled. I'd been trapped in my own experiences—now I was free.

Mullis describes the immediate after-effects of his inaugural trip: “I appreciated my life in a way I never had before. On the following Monday I went to school. I remember sitting on a bench, waiting for a class to begin, thinking, ‘That was the most incredible thing I've ever done.’”

It wasn't always rosy, though. The outspoken chemist reports feeling overwhelming feelings of guilt and ugliness when he dropped acid after leaving his wife and daughter. During a previous experiment, he synthesized an LSD analogue and accidentally took ten times the proper dose, which “annihilated” his personality. The next morning he couldn't recognize his wife or child. “I couldn't remember who I was, what I did, what I liked…. I had no preferences. I didn't recognize my body.” Twenty-four hours later, his memories and personality started to return, and in another day he was fully integrated again.

That nurse among nurses, Florence Nightingale, used morphine, though we don't know how often.

Anaïs Nin—experimental/erotic novelist, diarist, consort of Henry and June Miller—engaged one time in LSD therapy under its pioneer, psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Although she enjoyed the experience, she realized afterward that what she had experienced was already within her. “Therefore, I felt, the chemical did not reveal an unknown world. What it did was shut out the quotidian world as an interference and leave you alone with your dreams and fantasies and memories.”

Paracelcus, the physician and alchemist whose contributions to Western medicine are paramount, was a proponent of opium. PBS notes that in 1527: “During the height of the Reformation, opium is reintroduced into European medical literature by Paracelsus as laudanum. These black pills or ‘Stones of Immortality’ were made of opium thebaicum, citrus juice and quintessence of gold and prescribed as painkillers.”

Of mescaline, the celebrated Mexican poet Octavio Paz—winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature—wrote:

An encounter with mescaline: an encounter with our own selves, with the known-unknown. The double that wears our own face as its mask. The face that is gradually obliterated and transformed into an immense mocking grimace. The devil. The clown. This thing that I am not. This thing that I am. A martyrissible apparition. And when my own face reappears, there is nobody there. I too have left myself. Space, space, pure vibration. A great gift of the gods, mescaline is a window through which we look out upon endless distances where nothing ever meets our eye but our own gaze. There is no I: there is space, vibration, perpetual animation.

Plotinus, the ancient Roman philosopher who founded Neoplatonism, is said to have used opium.

We know that Edgar Allen Poe liked to quaff absinthe, sometimes mixed with brandy, but whether or not he used opium has been the subject of intense debate. Martin Booth, author of Opium: A History, believes that Poe was a user, possibly an addict.

Marcel Proust may have had a hard time remembering things past, considering his fondness for opium, morphine, hypnotics, camphor cigarettes, and possibly heroin, not to mention booze.

Living during the second half of the 1700s, Mary Robinson started out as a popular Shakespearean actress, but her career was aborted by scandal when she temporarily became the mistress of the Prince of Wales. However, she found a second life as a poet and novelist. For her rheumatism, she took heroic doses of laudanum. One night when she was 34, she had an opium dream about a menacing lunatic. Calling her daughter to her bedside, she dictated a poem (“The Maniac”); the next day, she didn't remember doing this. Thus, we have the first poem known to have crossed over from an opium dream. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was friends with Robinson, and skeptics think he might've made up the creation story of “Kubla Khan” in imitation of her.

Carl Sagan: Pulitzer Prize-winning astronomer and biologist; famous popularizer of science; creator and host of the Cosmos TV series; author of Cosmos, Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain, and other books; avid potsmoker. As discussed in Carl Sagan: A Life (and subsequently in my 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know), Sagan loved to toke reefer. He said that it enhanced his productivity, creativity, and insights, among other things. In his anonymous ode to Mary Jane in the classic Marihuana Reconsidered, he wrote: “My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover…. [T]he illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish novelist and poet, drank massive amounts of laudanum to combat stomach cramps. He wrote many works under the drug's influence, including Rob Roy and The Bride of Lammermoor.

When being interviewed by High Times, the intellectual-philosopher-theorist Susan Sontag was asked if she wrote while stoned on pot. She replied: “I've tried, but I find it too relaxing. I use speed to write, which is the opposite of grass.”

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on a six-day cocaine binge in 1886. Many commentators have noticed the uncanny similarity between Stevenson's drug of choice and the potion that turns nice guy Dr. Jekyll into the uncontrollable bastard Mr. Hyde.

Pancho Villa, the bandit who became a general and leader of the Mexican Revolution, was a party animal. Villa and his men were well-known for their copious use of marijuana, mescal, and sotol (psychedelic cactus whiskey).

Andrew Weil, M.D., is one of the biggest names in alternative medicine. Along with Deepak Chopra, his is the bearded face of holistic health in America. Combining his mainstream medical training (from Harvard) and scientific outlook with botany, natural healing, Eastern approaches, and consciousness studies has resulted in numerous best-selling books (including Spontaneous Healing and Natural Health, Natural Medicine), repeat appearances on Oprah and Larry King, and a professorship at the University of Arizona, where he founded and heads the Program in Integrative Medicine.

Weil has always been up-front and unapologetic about his professional and personal interest in psychoactive substances (among other methods of altering consciousness). Several of his early books addressed the topic, including the classics From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs and The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness. In the course of his writings, he has discussed his usage of marijuana, yage, MDA (a close cousin of ecstasy), Jimsonweed, coca leaf, cocaine, LSD, magic mushrooms, toad venom, and others that I've probably overlooked.

In March 2001, he briefly made headlines when he told 60 Minutes that LSD had cured his lifelong allergy to cats. If only acid were legal, he said, “I think I would recommend that some patients do it.” Not that he recommends all the drugs he's tried. His experience with Jimsonweed, for one, was horrible, and he advises against taking any plants of the Datura variety. “Its physical toxicity is, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, very dangerous. Its mental effects are unpredictable, often unpleasant, and always uncontrollable.”

Besides imbibing absinthe, Oscar Wilde smoked tobacco steeped in laudanum.

Honorable Mention

When we think of Sherlock Holmes, we imagine the pipe in his mouth, not the needle in his arm. Yet Arthur Conan Doyle's archetypal detective was a devotee of blow. Only one work contains a scene of Holmes' cocaine use, while eight others refer in passing to his habit. (Meanwhile, his fondness for morphine is only alluded to.) The second novel featuring the super-sleuth literally opens and closes with coke. These are the very first paragraphs of Sign of the Four:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Dr. John Watson, who is narrating the story, tells us that Holmes has been shooting up three times a day “for many months.” He asks Holmes: “Which is it to-day, morphine or cocaine?” The detective replies that it's the latter. At the time the book was written, the addictive, destructive aspects of the drug weren't widely known, so Doyle was going very much against the current when he had Watson give his friend a tongue-lashing over his jones. Holmes replies that he only mainlines coke when there is nothing else, such as a case, to keep him busy. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”

The novel closes with these paragraphs:

“The division seems rather unfair,” I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?”

“For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” And he stretched his long white hand up for it.

After Doyle killed off Holmes in 1893 and brought him back eight years later for an additional two novels and 30-plus short stories, the detective is never again mentioned as using drugs. images

Drug Quote # 1

“Among the hundreds of cocaine users I have known, I have only seen the drug induce good moods.”
–Andrew Weil, M.D.