from
BLENDER magazine
450 BC
Greek historian Herodotus records how tribesmen living near Mongolia throw hemp seeds onto a hot stone. “As it burns, it smokes like incense and the smell of it makes them drunk, just as wine does,” he writes of what sounds suspiciously like a pre-Christian Bonnaroo. “As more fruit is thrown on, they get more and more intoxicated until they jump up and start singing and dancing.”
1797
British poet and opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge wakes from a drug-induced sleep and writes his poem “Kubla Khan.” The hallucinogenic verses will later inspire the Rush track “Xanadu,” and maybe those nifty drum rolls in “Tom Sawyer” too.
1928
Louis Armstrong releases “Muggles,” whose title is the trumpeter’s pet name for marijuana. This, in turn, may help explain why he found the world so “wonderful.”
1937
Harry Anslinger, first commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, warns Congress that “coloreds with big lips” are “luring white women with jazz and marijuana.” He calls pot “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.” In response, Congress takes the first step toward outlawing it with the Marihuana Tax Act.
1940
Jazz saxophonist and drug dealer Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow is sent to prison for three years for selling marijuana.
1943
LSD is created by scientist Albert Hoffman, who accidentally ingests it through his fingers. He is subsequently forced to lie down and sinks into a “not unpleasant, intoxicated condition characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.”
1943
Keith Richards is born.
1954
Author Aldous Huxley publishes The Doors of Perception, which describes his experience taking mescaline. The similarly hallucinogen-friendly Jim Morrison will later name his band the Doors in tribute.
1955
Jazz saxophonist and longtime heroin addict Charlie Parker dies at the age of 34—not in his fifties, which is what the coroner who conducts the autopsy on Parker’s drug-ravaged body estimates he is.
1959
Jazz singer, alcoholic and drug addict
Billie Holiday is hospitalized suffering from heart and liver problems. While undergoing treatment, she is arrested after a quantity of cocaine is discovered in her tissue box. Nearly two months after being admitted, she dies.
1960
The Beatles begin playing a series of residencies in Hamburg, Germany, where they consume uppers such as Captogen and Preludin, which they purchase, unglamorously, from a men’s-room attendant.
1964
Bob Dylan introduces the Beatles to marijuana. “It opened a different kind of sensibility,” Paul McCartney later recalls. “Instead of Scotch and Coke and ciggies it became pot and wine.”
1965
Beach Boy songwriting genius Brian Wilson takes acid for the first—but by no means last—time after a friend tells him it will “really expand” his vision. Instead he stares at a lava lamp for an hour and then plays the same note on the piano for another 30 minutes.
1965
San Francisco rockers the Warlocks start playing the “Acid Tests,” a series of LSD-fueled happenings organized by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey. Later, while skimming through a dictionary under the influence of DMT, the band’s leader Jerry Garcia decides they should change their name to the Grateful Dead.
1965
Beatles George Harrison and John Lennon attend a dinner party where their host puts LSD-spiked sugar lumps in their coffees. Harrison later recalled the ensuing trip as “like a nightmare that wouldn’t stop. None of us got over it for about three days.”
1966
Bob Dylan releases “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (druggiest lyric: “But I would not feel so all alone/Everybody must get stoned”).
1966
Rolling Stone Brian Jones starts to have regular fits brought on by LSD. A mischievous Keith Richards makes matters worse by repeatedly asking “Is it the fucking snakes again, Brian?” 1967
The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Included among its tracks is “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a song the remarkably straight-faced John Lennon maintains is not about acid but was rather inspired by one of son Julian’s drawings.
1967
The Velvet Underground and Nico release their self-titled album, which includes the drug-dealer-oriented “I’m Waiting for the Man” and the heroin-oriented “Heroin.”
1968
Pink Floyd’s erratic, acid-taking frontman, Syd Barrett, is effectively fired from the band when the rest of the group decide not to pick him up on the way to a show in Southampton, England. He will make two solo albums before becoming a permanent recluse.
1969
At the Woodstock festival, Carlos Santana takes mescaline, assuming, wrongly, that he will have plenty of time to come down before he has to play his set. “It was pretty scary,” he will later tell Blender. “Especially when the neck of your guitar is dancing like a snake.”
1970
Janis Joplin dies from a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles hotel. Her body is not found for almost a day.
1970
Burger fiend and pill-popper
Elvis Presley writes to President Richard Nixon asking to be named a federal agent at large so that he can better combat the country’s drug problems. The pair subsequently meet at the White House, where Presley is given a badge from the bureau of narcotics.
1970
Jimi Hendrix overdoses on a mixture of alcohol, amphetamines, downers, tranquilizers and a prescription drug, Vesparax. He chokes to death on his own vomit.
1973
In the wake of his acid experiences, Brian Wilson’s brain effectively turns to blancmange. Increasingly reclusive, Wilson develops a serious cocaine addiction, starts snorting heroin and balloons to 250 pounds. In the next three years he fails to deliver a single song to the Beach Boys.
1973
Country-rocker and Stones buddy
Gram Parsons dies from a drug overdose, proving once and for all that you should never try to keep up with Keith Richards’s drug intake.
1973
Record-company executive and cocaine abuser Neil Bogart forms Casablanca Records, the most drug-drenched label of all time. “If you were into drugs,” one employee will later recall, “you were in Camelot.” Every afternoon a young assistant visits executives and takes their narcotic orders. The company will enjoy huge success with Kiss but not so much with Godz and Bugs Tomorrow.
1975
Neil Young releases the brilliant but bleak album Tonight’s the Night, inspired by the heroin overdoses of close friends Bruce Berry and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten.
1976
Fleetwood Mac spend months recording the classic Rumours. Their perfectionism is fueled by “yards and yards” of cocaine. Christine McVie would later recall, “It was quite natural to walk around with a great old sack of cocaine in your pocket and do these huge rails, popping acid, making hash cookies.”
1976
Peter Tosh releases the marijuana-extolling “Legalize It” (druggiest lyric: “Singers smoke it/And players of instruments, too/Legalize it, yea-ah yea-ah/That’s the best thing you can do.”)
1976
Queens punk originators the
Ramones release “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.”
1976
Neil Young performs at the Band’s historic Last Waltz show with a cocaine-booger dangling from one nostril.
1977
Studio 54 opens in New York. The disco era’s most famous club becomes infamous for having every bit as lax an attitude towards drug use as you might expect from an establishment whose décor includes a massive silver spoon.
1977
Elvis Presley dies of cardiac arrhythmia. The postmortem reveals traces of a dozen drugs in his bloodstream, including codeine, Quaaludes, Valium, Valmid, Placidyl, pentobarbital, butabarbital and phenobarbital.
1978
The Who drummer Keith Moon fatally overdoses after consuming “a bucket of pills.” Ironically, the pills in question are a prescription drug called Heminevrin, which he has been taking in an attempt to cure his chronic alcoholism.
1978
At New York’s Chelsea Hotel, the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious awakens from a drug-induced stupor to find girlfriend Nancy Spungen stabbed to death with Vicious’s knife. He later tells police, “I did it because I’m a dirty dog,” but there is doubt whether he committed the crime. He is still awaiting trial four months later when he dies of a heroin overdose.
1981
Washington, D.C., hardcore band
Minor Threat release the anti-drug track “Straight Edge” (anti-druggiest lyric: “Laugh at the thought of eating ’ludes/Laugh at the thought of sniffing glue/Always gonna keep in touch/Never want to use a crutch.”) The track will inspire the clean-living movement of the same name.
1981
Pre-fame (but by no means pre-drug)
Mötley Crüe members Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and Vince Neil move into a building near L.A.’s Whiskey A Go-Go club, where, according to Neil, “every night after we played, half the crowd would come back to our house and drink and do blow, Percodan, Quaaludes and whatever else we could get for free.”
1982
Hippie drug fiend David Crosby is arrested in a Dallas nightclub for possessing cocaine and a firearm.
1982
New Order’s label Factory Records opens the Hacienda in Manchester, England. Initially it’s a failure, but the club’s Ecstasy-fueled raves birth the pill-crazy “Madchester” scene, from which spring the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays. The club also attracts armed drug dealers, whose presence will hasten the club’s 1997 demise.
1983
Declaring that drugs could destroy “our whole next generation,” first lady Nancy Reagan launches her “Just Say No” campaign. Music stars who will later support her efforts include LaToya Jackson and, somewhat ironically, Whitney Houston.
1983
Freebase addict
Grandmaster Flash releases the anti-coke classic “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)”
1984
Ozzy Osbourne, while on tour with Mötley Crüe supporting Bark at the Moon, snorts a line of ants after running out of cocaine.
1987
Nikki Sixx overdoses and is declared clinically dead, but recovers. The European leg of Mötley Crüe’s tour is subsequently canceled, with the excuse given that there is too much snow—not up Crüe members’ noses but on venue roofs.
1987
Guns N’ Roses release their debut album, Appetite for Destruction, which includes two, count ’em, two songs that name-check heroin: “Mr. Brownstone” and “My Michelle.”
1988
Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak dies from a heroin overdose. His replacement, John Frusciante, will say “screw you, learning curve!” by also abusing the drug.
1989
The New York Times declares that the worsening crack epidemic is threatening the failure of all civilized life. Those who fail to help the situation include a pre-fame
Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, both of whom will deal the drug.
1989
The Houston-based “Sizzurp” scene is born when DJ Screw (Robert Davis Jr.) makes the first of his slowed-down hip-hop mix-tapes. Over the next decade, hundreds more will follow, eagerly bought by rap fans, many of whom, like Screw himself, are drinking codeine-infused cough syrup.
1990
In a non-doctor-approved attempt to ease his chronic stomach pain, future grunge icon
Kurt Cobain shoots heroin for the first time. He subsequently writes in his diary that he has decided to become a junkie.
1991
Former New York Doll Johnny Thunders dies from an overdose of cocaine and methadone.
1991
Redman releases “How to Roll a Blunt.” Druggiest lyric: “Lick the blunt and then the Phillie blunt middle you split/Don’t have a razor blade, use ya fuckin’ fingertips.”
1992
Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro dies. At first it is reported that Porcaro had become ill after applying pesticides to his lawn, but it will later be announced by the coroner that his demise was thanks to a cocaine-induced hardening of the arteries.
1992
Dr. Dre releases his weed-lovin’ debut solo album, The Chronic. It will go on to sell more than five million copies.
1993
Militant marijuana rappers Cypress Hill release Hits From the Bong.
1993
Depeche Mode lead singer Dave Gahan’s weight drops to just 100 pounds in the course of the band’s narco-blitzed 14-month Songs of Faith and Devotion world tour.
1994
In March, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain falls into a drug-induced coma while the band are on tour in Italy. The next month he fatally shoots himself after injecting heroin.
1994
Method Man releases “Tical” (druggiest lyric: “What’s that shit the niggaz smokin’?/Tical, tical, tical/Pass it over here/Tical, tical, tical”).
1995
Grateful Dead overlord and junkie Jerry Garcia dies. Although traces of heroin are found in his bloodstream, a coroner’s office spokesman states that the guitarist died from a heart attack and not an overdose. In one of history’s greatest understatements, the spokesman also points out that Garcia “didn’t take care of himself.”
1996
Sublime singer Bradley Nowell dies of a heroin overdose two months before the release of his band’s breakthrough album, which will sell over five million copies.
1998
Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland is arrested in New York in possession of heroin. “I just bought some drugs,” he tells the police, unnecessarily.
1999
Ol’ Dirty Bastard is arrested by police, who find him in possession of 20 bags of cocaine. A distressed ODB tries to convince the cops that, as children “look up” to the Wu-Tang rapper, perhaps they can make the drugs “disappear.” They don’t.
2000
Houston rapper Big Moe releases the cough-syrup-oriented CD The City of Syrup. Six months later, his mentor, “sizzurp” pioneer DJ Screw, dies of a codeine overdose.
2000
Queens of the Stone Age release “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” (druggiest lyric: “Nicotine, valium, Vicodin, marijuana, Ecstasy and alcohol/ C-c-c-c-c-cocaine”).
2001
Afroman releases the novelty hit “Because I Got High.”
2001
Scott Weiland discovers that what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas when he is arrested for pushing his wife against a wall after she attempts to prevent his buying prescription drugs.
2002
Weed dealers across America weep like children when longtime herbalist Snoop Dogg announces that he has quit smoking pot.
2002
In Seattle, Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley fatally overdoses on heroin and cocaine. His body is not found for two weeks.
2002
On Primetime Live, a distressed-looking Whitney Houston responds to Diane Sawyer’s questions about her drug use by admitting, “I grant you, I partied.” But the diva denies rumors that she has become addicted to crack, explaining that she makes “too much money” to smoke the drug.
2002
In Las Vegas, Who bassist John Entwistle dies from heart disease exacerbated by cocaine use. 2002
Bassist Dee Dee Ramone dies from a heroin overdose.
2004
Shortly before the release of Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, singer Jeff Tweedy enters rehab for treatment of his addiction to painkillers.
2004
Almost 40 years after its release, Paul McCartney fails to shock the world by finally admitting that “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” is, indeed, about acid.
2004
On his Comedy Central show, Dave Chappelle lampoons funk legend Rick James’s propensity for drug-induced mayhem. Chappelle is assisted in this by the bassist himself but, seven months later, James is dead. The subsequent autopsy blames an enlarged heart due to the effects of multiple drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, Xanax, Valium and Vicodin.
2005
Rap mogul Irv Gotti is charged with laundering drug money for a New York drug trafficker. 2005
Weezer release the anti-drug song “We Are All on Drugs” (anti-druggiest lyric: “And the best of your days/Will all vanish into haze/When you’re on drugs”).
2006
Rehab fever sweeps the nation! Mel Gibson enters detox after an arrest on suspicion of DUI that features an anti-Semitic tirade; Mere months into his marriage to actress Nicole Kidman, country star Keith Urban cancels his Country Music Awards appearance to enter rehab for alcohol abuse; Congressman Mark Foley [R-FL] checks into the Sierra Tucson treatment center amidst an investigation into sexually explicit emails that he had been sending to male teenage pages; After 20 years of sobriety, actor Robin Williams seeks treatment for alcoholism; '80s pop star Boy George sidesteps jail time for a cocaine charge by entering rehab; Keane's lead singer Tom Chaplin cancels tour plans for Under the Iron Sea and enters posh clinic the Priory, where he meets Babyshambles lead singer Pete Doherty and the Darkness' Justin Hawkins. Silver lining: the three click as friends and begin writing together! Maybe drugs aren't that bad, after all!
Labels: pot
