Why Do Artists Get Addicted To DRUGS?

I’m strolling down the street, in the sun, wind in my hair, minding my own business when I notice these low-budget Mad Max types standing around looking kinda shady. I look down and one of them, who’s wearing a pink hat and goggles, is busy with the screws and chain on a bike.

Around me, there’s already a bunch of people watching it happen but not reacting so I think:

‘What is this, did the circus come to town? Did I miss an amazing, off the chain performance? Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

So I walk up to the pink hat & goggles guy and I say, ‘Hey mate, what are you doing?’ But he and his friends jump back like wild beasts into the alley, laughing like hyenas. It was then that I realised that he was just trying to steal the wheel of this nice bike.

Some tough looking bloke walks past me and says, ‘Thieving bastards,’ and I’m just standing there thinking, ‘why didn’t you say anything, Mr Muscle?’

So anyway, after that I’m trying to get the bike wheel on properly so that if they do come back at least it would take them a minute or two to get it off again. But I look around, and now people were giving me ‘the stare’ like I’m the bad guy for getting involved? By this point, I was getting pretty tyred of all this…

And I just wanted to know, what were you thinking ‘general public’? Can you guys say something? Nah nah nah people would rather not get involved. It’s the English way to turn our noses up and ignore it. And this is why artists get addicted to drugs.

Low On Health

So, in video games like GTA, Spyro and Barnyard you get this health bar that doesn’t recharge unless you drink a soda, eat butterflies or I don’t know bash your head into a brick.

Over time you take enough damage and 1 tiny thing like falling from a ledge that’s a little too high or being wacked by a bunch of flowers, will kill you.

And that’s kind of like in life when we waste our energy walking on eggshells caring about what other people think. But other people aren’t eggs, and where are all these eggshells coming from? What does it matter if I step on them? Eggshells don’t exactly make a lot of noise when you step on them. Fuck it I’m stepping on them.

Other people aren’t eggs or monsters. It just feels like they are sometimes.

Coffee

Imagine this, it’s early in the morning, you’re tired and you’re at the cafe trying to pay for a drink but all you’ve got is a £20 note. The barista accepts but she gives you this look, a real done up look. She looks at you a bit funny and you’ve not had your morning caffeine so it hits you at a thousand miles an hour. Right in the face.

Why would she look at you like that, how dare she when you haven’t even really said anything? You leave with your drink but the moment goes round and round in your mind. You can’t get much done at work and you’re still thinking about it after work.

It’s not until you’ve had a few bevvies with the boys at the pub that you start to forget about it. Why the hell did she look at me like that? Oh well, this wine is a nice colour.

Some of you are thinking, that a stranger looking at you a bit funny is trivial, and yeah it is. But more often than not we hold onto this kind of stuff and escape internally instead of taking it on the chin. Because it’s literally hardwired into your DNA to be sensitive to this stuff. We evolved to be accepted by our hunter-gatherer tribe so being rejected is painful. Being rejected by your tribe means you’re gonna get hunted by wolves and shit.

And as the wolves rip your legs off and start eating you alive it’s gonna be hard to remember what Shakespeare said,

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

But if someone injected enough opioids into your body before the wolves got to you, being eaten alive wouldn’t phase you at all.

Juice Wrld

And it’s not just strangers looking at you funny that can make you feel like butt cheeks. Sometimes it's our entire lives that are the problem.

For example, Juice Wrld was this young rapper who made emo music cool again but he died at 21 from a prescription overdose. I think drugs were Juice’s way of avoiding the painful feelings he felt.. from prostituting himself.

Before you go on a Taxi Driver rampage, I’m not talking about sex. People prostitute themselves all the time, by doing things they don’t like in search of a vague future return. Maybe sex, maybe food or Love or security. We don’t know what we want but we know that we want it and we want it right now.

You might go to the extreme of snorting a line of cocaine when you’re feeling down or exhausted, but some people just scroll. Some lay on their side for 4 hours while binge-watching Netflix, some make films to try and satisfy their insatiable desire for validation but ultimately, we’ll do anything to distract ourselves from ourselves.

Thing is, after a while, we start to need that external fuel just to not feel bad and in doing so we cannibalize ourselves. Kind of like how pretty girls get famous on Instagram by flashing their tits but then realise maybe that’s their only viable career path.

If you’re a musician who’s sold millions of sad albums, you’re not going to stop. Playing to your weakness for financial gain makes sense in the short term and eventually, you might even start to think that ‘persona’ really is you, but it’s like Jim Morrison said:

‘Most people love you for who you pretend to be.’

Not me by the way. I know what I’m talking about.

The truth is, Juice Wrld and people like him didn’t need all the drugs, pain and suffering. Creative energy is part of a person’s genetic makeup and if they cured their addiction, their DNA wouldn’t suddenly change.

It’s not drugs that make you creative, just take a look at the hundreds of sober artists and the millions of unartistic addicts. But if it isn’t, where does it come from?

Beer Can Theory

I think that the best way to describe creative people is with the ‘Beer Can Theory’. Coined by sociologist, Liana Gobra

So basically, imagine a nice cold 6 pack of beers, each can represents a trait normally associated with mental illness. If you have all the beer cans and a strong plastic thingy to hold them together, you’re technically, a bit mad but you have all the traits required to create art and you are pretty good at, you know, living in society.

Let’s say your tool is a hammer, but you can’t just go and smash your sister's laptop to pieces and say you're being creative because she will never want to speak to you again. It’d be a better idea to just politely hammer in some nails and put up a nice shelf for her.

Things like a cigarette addiction can mask feelings of anxiety and OCD but OCD compulsiveness can actually help you get your work finished and out there. Traits of autism can help you see more connections in your work, schizophrenia helps with imagination and a little ADHD helps you start new projects and ideas quickly. This may be why I have 7 unfinished editing projects right now.

Over time, if your mental health declines from the pressure of being ‘’a creative’’ or from drug use and ‘yes men’ enabling destructive behaviour, the plastic thingy can fall apart. Then the artist is just beer cans rolling freely down the road.

There is a theory that creatives have a stunted dopamine system so they crave things like making art and taking drugs more than your average Joe, making them more at risk for addiction, but who cares? We all look pretty much the same with our heads in the toilet. We creatives might have a different toolset but honestly, we just need to learn how to use it properly.

Create Conflict

Saturn Devouring His Son was made after Goya lost his hearing. Mr Brightside is based on a true story about coming out of prison and Marley and Me is real, dogs die, just kidding that film is basically sci-fi, isn’t that right Ben?. Each of these was made by people who knew how to use their tools.

But knowing how to use your tools is one thing. Overcoming conflict, the essence of art and storytelling is a whole different mug of paintbrushes.

But an easy way to create conflict — is with crack.

Steven King wrote all of his darkest and arguably best books out of his mind on cocaine. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, couldn’t exist without Hunter S. Thompson’s colossal drug use and Juice Wrld’s music just wouldn’t have been the same. We kinda like to see what comes out of a person’s mind when they consume enough drugs to sedate a small town. But it isn’t a life I’d want for myself…

Steven King realised this and sobered up, and now it’s his view that substance-abusing artists are just substance abusers, and he has a point. Artistic druggies are still druggies.

Juice Wrld didn’t take drugs because he was a tortured artist or because it made him more creative, he took drugs because that’s what drug addicts do.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be ‘addicted’ to something if you’re ‘living your best life.’ — I don’t think Juice Wrld was.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Cause I have no idea what the fuck is going on.

Basically, for most of us, drugs work, for a little while. But it’s like shooting yourself out of a cannon or setting yourself on fire, you’ll go really really fast and win the race, but soon after you’re gonna die.

Avoidance

Something wasn’t right. I had shoed away the wannabe mad max thugs but I felt I was missing something. I closed my eyes and saw a computer screen, a keyboard, and a mouse. Blurred LED lights straight across the wall in front were coming into focus as I rubbed my eyes. But there I was, on the screen. Seeing through my eyes that street in Exeter. But also seeing through my eyes this computer room, this messy computer room, the second monitor, the loan repayment emails, the banking app and the overdraft. What have I been avoiding? There’s an aggressive knock at the door and I know that whatever it is, it’s too late.

‘Where’s the fucking money GEEEOOORGE?

I look down at the pill on my desk.

If there is any way out of this, it starts here. ~~

Conclusion

Yeah, I know. I’ve got to be pretty f****** autistic to make the jump from bike thief to artists on drugs but there you go... Or maybe it is deeper than that.

I don’t know I’m just some guy on the internet, take what you want out of this.

But look if you’re not gonna face someone who’s stealing a bike wheel right in front of you, what else are you going to let slide?