Disinformation Book of Lists (2 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Personal thanks to	Â
1	Anne
2-3	Mom and Dad
4	Ruthanne
5	Jennifer
6	Billy Dale
7-8	Brett and Cristy
9	Darrell
10-11	Terry and Rebekah
Â	Â
Research thanks to	Â
1	Michael Ravnitzky
2	Richard Metzger
3	Matt Silvey
4	Beau Gunderson
5	Kevin Saylor
6	Hilary Claire Carmody
7	“rvdh0”
8	“walrus and carpenter”
Â	Â
Publishing thanks to	Â
1	Gary Baddeley
2	Richard Metzger
3	Ralph Bernardo
4	Alex Burns
5	The rest of the Disinfo gang
6-8	Paul, Tomo, and Mary
Â	Â
Trade thanks to	Â
1	Consortium Distribution
2+	All booksellers
Â	Â
Ultimate thanks to	Â
1+	My readers

+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.

1

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
.

2

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.”

3

Little woman
Louisa May Alcott
was addicted to morphine.

4

Marcus Aurelius
, Roman Emperor and philosopher, took opium.

5

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

6

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.

7

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.

8

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.”

9

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

10

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.

11

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
.

12

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

13

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.

14

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

15

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
.

16

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.”

17

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

18

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

19

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
: