It’s probably an understatement to say that most artists have taken drugs at least once in their lives. Even though some authors maintain a stuffy air of collegiate lawns and tweed jackets, many can party as hard as anyone else. In fact, there are so many writers who used drugs that it was kind of a hassle to narrow down this list. Every beat author could have taken up a spot, but we figured that we should shine a light on those special famous writers who wrote high and gave audiences something to really digest. So put on your groovy fringe vest and dig on this of famous authors who used drugs and did their best work while high.
The interesting thing about the authors on this list of famous drug addicts is that they don’t all just write in one genre, or exist in one time period. There are science fiction authors, poets, and mystic leaders who were all baked out of their minds on their drug of choice while they sat with their quills in hand and set their words to paper. You’ll see a few drugs of choice on this list - most of them are chemicals that were designed to keep someone up and working long past their bedtime, and a good number of those pills, liquids, etc. don’t even exist anymore.
Even if you’re living your life drug free, take some time to get to know these famous writers who used drugs, because their work is astounding no matter how it came to be.
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Aleister Crowley
Yes, Aleister Crowley was more of a mystic/cult leader than anything else, but he wrote a bunch of books and plays that were all about his attachments to mysticism and his love affair with heroin (and even a few lesser drugs). He first came across heroin when it was prescribed for his bronchitis, and, until his death in 1947, he went out of his way to convince his friends and followers to become more magical with the help of drugs.
Ayn Rand
In order to finish her masterwork, The Fountainhead, Rand turned to Benzedrine and finished one chapter a week. She continued to take the drug for the next three decades, so now we know what to blame for Atlas Shrugged.
Charles Bukowski
Admittedly, Bukowski didn't take "drugs" per se, but for most of his adult life he never stopped drinking, and as just about any high school Health teacher will tell you, alcohol is a drug, too. At the height of his alcoholism he wrote such seminal works as Love Is a Dog From Hell and Hot Water Music.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning gets a bad wrap when it comes to the world of poetry. She was born too early to be a peer of generations of depressed babe poets like Emily Dickens or even Sylvia Plath, and her work can be hard to get into if you don't know the best inroads (The Seraphim and Other Poems isn't a bad place to start).
But Browning could party as hard as any 20th century poet. In fact, she took any chance she could to get zonked out on opium, which was pretty easy to do in Victorian England.
Hunter S. Thompson
Of all the writers on this list, Thompson probably took the most drugs. In fact, there was even a schedule for his drug intake that made its way into his biography. His daily habit included everything from orange juice, to cocaine and Halcion.
Jack Kerouac
The mythology surrounding Jack Kerouac's most famous work, On the Road, is that he wrote it in a non-stop three week period. Which is sort of true. But the thing historians tend to shy away from is that Kerouac was taking benzadrine (basically speed) in order to fuel his writing. This was a nasty habit that would follow him to his death.
Jean-Paul Sartre
For a guy whose job title was "philosopher," Sartre was pretty wild. Rather than walk around in a robe scratching his chin and wondering about death or whatever, Sartre used a chemical cocktail of everything from Benzedrine to mescaline (a psychedelic that really freaks you out). The best story about Sartre's love of taking psychedelics involves taking so much mescaline that he started seeing crabs everywhere.
Philip K. Dick
There are two different Philip K. Dicks: pre-LSD PKD and post-LSD PKD. He always took massive amounts of amphetamines in order to fuel his word count (in the days of pulp science fiction, authors were paid by the word count and the more drugs you took the more you could type), but once he finally tried LSD and other hallucinogenics, he opened and his mind and began to write his most immersive and popular work.
William S. Burroughs
Heroin is so synonymous with William Burroughs that's it feels weird telling people he took drugs. In fact, Burroughs was on and off junk so often it's shocking that he lived into his eighties. But back to the heroin, he was injecting it steadily throughout the '50s while he worked on Junkie and Naked Lunch.
Stephen King
Stephen King, the master of horror, has been open about not only his alcohol abuse, which was the basis for The Shining, but also his heavy cocaine use that lasted from 1978 to 1986. Despite some of his best material coming out in that time frame, he openly admits that his final book written while cruising the snowy highway, The Tommyknockers, is one of his worst.