Any Historical Figures Who Had A Drug Abuse Problem?
November 26, 2009 by admin
Filed under Drug Abuse
I’m doing this essay for my homework, and as a group we have to give examples of “famous people” who were destroyed by drug abuse. Now i know all of my group members are going to pick Britney Speakers, and such. But i want to used Historical Figures.Any Names?
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Sigmund Freud – he was a long time cocaine user and even wrote papers on it.
Howard Hughes
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Grover Cleveland
Charles Dickens
Ulysses S. Grant
Thomas Edison
Legend has it that a famous surgeon at Johns Hopkins, Halstead, many years ago in the pre-antibiotic era, was addicted to cocaine– considered a “mild stimulant” in those days. His habit could keep him working 20 hours a day, and his Residents were expected to keep the same hours. It also made him very compulsive- so that every bleeder had to be clamped and tied.He developed a whole new system with special clamps- if you look at a surgical catalog today, most of the clamps are Halstead forceps. Now, collections of blood in tissue are a great culture medium, so with a dry field, his infection rate dropped dramatically. Word got out, and everyone emulated him in every way, ( but they did not know about the cocaine) Residents were expected to work ungodly hours. His habit saved thousands of lives from infection- probably hundreds of thousands. Training is gradually getting away from the grueling hours for Residency training,but it is still pretty stressful. He was a brilliant surgeon, and ( this is a legend, remember!) his habit was one of the best things to happen to Surgery.
during the Opium Wars half the British parliament were hooked on morphine or other opiates, Hitler and JFK both were regularly injected by their doctors with what was essentially methamphetamine and as a result developed addictions without really knowing what their doctors were giving them.
many druggies out there in history: Hermann Goering, Aleister Crowley, Sigmund Freud (big cokehead), Czar Nicholas II, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carrol…
Crowley might be a good one to do for your essay because he was a famous author and occultist who claimed his dealings in magick would make him powerful yet he still ended up a penniless junkie at the time of his death.
benjamin franklin…..he had alot of problems, including using prostitution. link below
Ulysses S. Grant union general and President of the United States was a known alcoholic.
Sherlock Homes
Hitler