Biggest junky/addict author

[Anonymous No.5260819]

Which famous author had the worst substance abuse problems? I think it's gotta be either stephen king or hemingway. Denis Johnson sounds like he had a rough time of it too but there's less info about him out there. What do y'all think? Who is the king of strung out writers? Please no HST/Huxley head guru fags either.

[Anonymous No.5260823]

>>5260819
probably burroughs

[Anonymous No.5260826]

Hunter S. Thompson is the king of strung out writers, because he did so willingly.

[Anonymous No.5260837]

>>5260826
He exaggerated everything about his life and glorified it as part of his image though. Plus the whole willingness thing, if true, negates the point.

Burroughs is a great one I hadn't thought of though.

[Anonymous No.5260842]

>>5260823
Yeah, Burroughs did heroin for three decades.

Finland has a lot of authors who drank themselves to death. Saarikoski, Selo, Waltari apparently once ended up in Italy during a drinking binge he started in Helsinki.

[Anonymous No.5260849]

>>5260819
Coleridge and De Quincey had addictions that strike me as quite tragic.

[Anonymous No.5260856]

>>5260819
terance mckenna

[Anonymous No.5260870]

Will Self, probably the best contemporary author writing at the moment, would do heroin before getting out of bed in the morning. He was even caught smuggling and snorting heroin of the UK prime ministers private Jet:

"Mr Self was sacked from the Observer after the allegation surfaced last week, but issued a strenuous denial through his lawyers. However, in an exclusive interview with this paper on Friday night, he admitted to snorting heroin in the toilet on John Major's jet.

The self-confessed former heroin addict went to the toilet during the flight and snorted a line of heroin along the side of the wash basin. He said: "So I was smacked out on the Prime Minister's jet - big deal."

Mr Self's astonishing disclosure is bound to delight the Conservatives who are desperate for any ammunition with which to hit back at sleaze allegations.

The self-styled literary enfant terrible said he had denied the charge because he thought there would be no evidence to support it."

[Anonymous No.5260928]

Anyone who ever got clean doesn't count, so no Burroughs or King.

Alcohol addiction strikes me as more horrible than opiate addiction as long as you can afford it. After all, opiates aren't really all that harmful while liquor is pure poison.

Dying of suicide is less hardcore than literally drinking yourself to that, so that would leave out people like Hemingway and poser Thompson. Bukowski drank almost moderately in his later years.

I think this leaves people such as Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac who literally drank themselves to death, but Thomas' actually died of pneumonia. Kerouac sat drinking malt liquor and whisky one morning and started vomiting blood and died of internal haemorrhage caused by cirrhosis. I think he, and people under similar cirumstances, win the game of self-destruction by addiction.

[Anonymous No.5260933]

>>5260870
>probably the best contemporary author writing at the moment

Nope. Self is a narcisstic douchebag who can't write a birthday card without using a thesaurus

[Anonymous No.5260944]

>>5260928
I think discounting those who cleaned up and killed themselves is pretty arbitrary, considering both are a matter of circumstances and luck. I certainly wouldn't discount king, hemingway or Burroughs.

[Anonymous No.5260958]

>>5260928
>>5260944

ITT: the Substance Abuse Olympics

[Anonymous No.5260965]

>>5260933
This. The Book of Dave seemed like quite a fun idea but I can't read his stuff without getting irritated at the prose and even hearing his voice

[Anonymous No.5260967]

>>5260933
>Self is a narcisstic douchebag
Why do you think that? When he appears on TV, mostly on shooting stars and other panel or talking head shows, he's usually acting out a scripted persona.

>who can't write a birthday card without using a thesaurus
Not true at all. I could see how you would struggle with his wide vocabulary in some articles, but other than Umbrella, most of his books are pretty easy to read. Which books of his did you try? If Umbrella, then it's a tribute to Joyce, and the meandering stream of conscious and archaic words are deliberate.

"Umbrella is not, be warned, altogether easy going: 400 pages of unbroken stream-of-consciousness dotted across three time frames, leaping jaggedly between four points of view, and with barely a paragraph break, let alone a chapter heading. I started out wondering whether, as a prank, Self had decided to write the novel that Richard Tull, the unpopular writer in Martin Amis's The Information, is working on. Self's sentences themselves sometimes resemble Victorian lunatic asylums refitted for 1970s use: ugly, overstuffed, clattering with the moans of lunatics and bristling with gothic spires. The antic gurgles of laughter you find in Self's earlier work are few and far between. In their place, though, is a sustained depth and seriousness, and an ambition of technique that I haven't seen before.

I don't mean to put you off. Umbrella is old-school modernism. It isn't supposed to be a breeze. But it is, to use the literary critical term of art, amazing. "

[Prometheus No.5260968]

Philip K. Dick

Although, it all depends what kind of drugs we're going on about here.

[Anonymous No.5260971]

>>5260968
*unzips dick

[Anonymous No.5260992]

f scott fitzgerald partied like every single night and woke up drunk at 11 am
from wiki "Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s."

fitzgerald supposedly spent his time in a 50/50 split between parties and hospitals.

[Anonymous No.5260998]

Patrick Süskind

[Steki YUNG LEAN !!PuHUWgNu6I+ No.5261017]

>>5260819
>>>alcoholfags
>>>drugfags

retards
nothing great came out of abusing substances
nothing ever will

stonerfags and addicts use this as a cover-up for being mentally weak, especially DMTfags

muh DMT its its released when you dream and when you die so deep dun spice ^_____^ blaze it

retards all

[Anonymous No.5261019]

>>5261017
how do you abuse DMT

[Anonymous No.5261022]

>>5261017
I feel sorry for you.

[Anonymous No.5261024]

>>5261019
with my fists

[Anonymous No.5261034]

>>5260944
If you can quit, you clearly don't have the worst substance abuse problem.

[Anonymous No.5261046]

>>5261019
>how do you abuse DMT

I abuse mine verbally, and I usually set aside a small amount for severe abuse. The bulk of it just gets an angry rant, but the special stuff set aside gets screamed at for hours. I pace the room with my hands clasped behind my back then pause, point one shaking finger at the DMT and scream at it until my eyes bulge.

[Anonymous No.5261060]

>>5260968
Dick barely did any drugs, and allegedly, his body absorbed his amphetamines too quick for them to have any actual effect.

He was just crazy

[Anonymous No.5261062]

>>5261017
>That grammar.
>That punctuation.
>retards all

Jesus-fucking-Christ.

[Anonymous No.5261093]

>>5261062
Should probably ignore tripfags that have a plastered together ironic trip like they're fresh out of /mu/

[Feminister is a pederast No.5261096]

>>5260819
>HST/Huxley head guru fags
kek

and yeah, borroughs is the biggest junky writer i know of. didnt know king had substance problems.

>>5260928
i think that post wraps it up nicely

[Anonymous No.5261115]

>>5261093
Fuck! You're right. That one was on me.

[Anonymous No.5261122]

>>5261060
>allegedly, his body absorbed his amphetamines too quick for them to have any actual effect.
You know that's utter bullshit, right? Just crazytalk from a crazy man with a ridiculous imagination caused in part by the drugs themselves. He fairly often said contradictory or impossible things about his own life, it's hard to say which were true but that one is medically unlikely, to say the least.

[Anonymous No.5261129]

>>5260856
kek

[Anonymous No.5261130]

>>5261096
King had massive substance abuse problems. He abused alcohol for decades the became addicted to cocaine after trying to help with his hangovers. Plus weed pills and everything else. He claims he doesn't even remember writing cujo he was so fucked up, and the tommyknockers was writing at the nadir of his problems and is practically gibberish. Some of his books, like the shining and misery, are amazing in their depictions of addiction. He only got clean in the early 90s after his family staged an intervention by dumping out a mountain of paraphanelia like liquor bottles and bloody coke spoons they'd found in his trash.

[Anonymous No.5261131]

>>5260928
What about Poe? Wasn't he an alcoholic himself as well?

[Feminister is a pederast No.5261147]

>>5261130
sick. i couldnt imagine writing on booze, it's always crap when i do it.

[Anonymous No.5261207]

>>5261017
>Steki
top kek

[Anonymous No.5261222]

>>5261147
That would explain King's oeuvre, wouldn't it.

[Anonymous No.5261225]

>>5261222
someone had to say it, but don't you find it a little pathetic that it was you?

[Anonymous No.5262939]

>>5260826
William S. Burroughs Jr..
died earlier than his father from extreme alcholism and meth-abuse.

[Anonymous No.5263440]

>>5262939
Who the fuck is that? We asked for writers.

[Anonymous No.5263565]

>>5260823
I knocked Junky over in a day and it messed with me for a solid week after finishing it

[Anonymous No.5263567]

>>5260819

Wilkie Collins consumed enough laudanum to kill the average dinner party and couldn't remember writing The Moonstone.

>all these plebs bringing up Burroughs

[Anonymous No.5264018]

>>5260958
read thread subject fuckhead

[Anonymous No.5264020]

>>5260819
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Phillip K. Dick. Not the worst perhaps, but my off the top contributions.

[Anonymous No.5264036]

>>5264020
Did Artie really ride the white pony that much? I'd heard he'd only experimented with it a very little, and that the popular image of Holmes being a cokehead is really more of an urban myth unsubstantiated by the actually novels. I don't really know though.

[Anonymous No.5264041]

Freud got high on cocaine and thought everything represented a dick.

[Anonymous No.5264051]

It's funny how abusing alcohol, one of the few legal, most widely used drugs, ends up being the most ugly. People literally drink themselves to death. It's like a car crash in slow motion. Even heroin addicts typically end up dead by accident through an overdose. But alcoholics will continue on with their lives like normal while poisoning themselves until their bodies eventually shut down.

And still, there's a greater stigma attached to the "hard drugs". There's something wrong with that.

[Anonymous No.5264057]

>>5264051
I wish alcohol had been illegal when I turned 21. From 21 onward, my life went to shit because all I did was drink.

[Anonymous No.5264065]

>>5264057
The world would be much better if it were illegal. Unfortunately, its so easy to make outlawing it wouldn't help. So we have to learn how to live with a destructive force like alcohol, instead of running or hiding from it. I guess there's a lesson in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I still don't wish it were never discovered.

[இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ— No.5264085]

>>5264041

He did not consider cigars to be phallic.

[Anonymous No.5264087]

>>5264065
I think I spent 10 years drunk. This meant I could do hardly anything, not read, not think. It was a big drunken blur of stupidity, stupors, and waste.

[Anonymous No.5264093]

>>5264085

I man who psycho-analyzed everything as phallic didn't consider cigars phallic and he just so happened to smoke them all the time.

What a coincidence.

[Anonymous No.5264094]

>>5264085
He was, essentially, high on drugs and surrounded by penises. What a weird life.

[Anonymous No.5264096]

>>5264087
It's hell, for sure.

[Anonymous No.5264098]

>>5264093
Way to miss the joke. Google "Freud cigar is just a cigar story".

[Anonymous No.5264101]

>>5264098

Yeah my bad on a nasty semen hangover from a bukkake party I was at last night.

[Anonymous No.5264105]

>>5264101
Happens to the best of us.

[Anonymous No.5264110]

>>5264036
Dude, Holmes did coke, heroin, etc throughout the books, it's more poetically stated. It's not 'damn nigga shot up all day' its like 'Holmes retired to his study, taking his syringe from the mantelpiece. In this weather, he was quite accustomed to having to treat his pain' or something, I did it wrong but you get the idea.

[Anonymous No.5264125]

the book The Trip to Echo Spring seems interesting, is relevant. About cheever, carver, hemngwy and some others id ont remember

I drink 1litre of whisky a week and it already ruins me. no idea how ppl drink more, must be pure desperation/terror at not being drunk

[Anonymous No.5264157]

I'd say H.P. Lovecraft had the most agonizing "substance" abuse of writer if you consider his obsession with dream states (technically natural DMT), chimerical phenomenon, and a nocturnal lifestyle. I'm sure there was some alcohol abuse in the mix as well. Lovecraft doused every story with deranged themes of humankind's inevitable failure and it's no wonder his own thoughts devoured him from the inside out.
2SPOOKY4ME

[Anonymous No.5264166]

>>5264157
>dream states (technically natural DMT)
mfw
You do realize dreaming is cholinergic and has nothing to do with DMT, right? Poison yourself with datura or too much benadryl sometime, the acetylcholine blockade resembles dreaming far more than any DMT trip because it's actually the same goddamn system. If only everyone who spouts bullshit about DMT could be tied on a pyre and collectively set alight. Yes, I am hurtfrustrated.

[Anonymous No.5264172]

Guys, assuming smoking marijuana is starting with the Greeks for literature, where does one go from there? Do I snort cocaine? Is that patrician? Is DMT the Finnegans Wake of drugs? What is the Ulysses of drugs? What is the literary equivalent of taking adderall and percoset together?

[Anonymous No.5264194]

>>5264172
Dude, you are going a little crazy while thinking to be yourself a genious. Just stick with coffee, meditations and writing and you will be alright

[Anonymous No.5264196]

>>5264172
Ascended tier
sobriety

Top tier
DOC, DOM, 4-HO-DMT (intramuscular), DiPT DPT, DET, DMT (oral w/ MAOI, intramuscular)

High tier
LSD, 4-HO-DMT (oral), DMT (vaporized), 2C-E, 2C-P, DOB, 4-HO-MiPT, 3-MeO-PCP, αMT

As-needed tier
2C-B, 2C-C, cannabis, 2-FMA, desoxypipradrol, d-amphetamine, MXE, alcohol, benzodiazepines, thienodiazepines, nicotine (vaporized), methylphenidate, ethylphenidate

Shit tier
MDMA, caffeine, opiates, DXM, tobacco, cocaine

[Anonymous No.5264200]

>>5264196
>sobriety
lmfao

[Anonymous No.5264201]

>>5264194

how do I into meditations if I have an existentialist's metaphysics?

that is, I guess I have materialist tendencies

[Anonymous No.5264203]

>>5264196
Shut up.

[Anonymous No.5264204]

>>5264200
whatever you say, child

[Anonymous No.5264211]

>>5264204
Yeah being dead sure is fun.

[Anonymous No.5264214]

Lord Byron

[Anonymous No.5264220]

>>5264201
Why do people associate drugs with tribalism and nature? Is it because that is how they feel when they consume them? How is it natural to not be aware of your breath, and isn't that the same feeling. The only thing left after feeling in touch with nature is adrenaline, and that is why coffee goes in. And that is it. You may try to get high or drunk but nothing beats adrenaline. Then you just want to write. You just do.

[Anonymous No.5264224]

>>5260837
you started a thread about junkies and you didn't LEAD with Burroughs? get the fuck out of here.

[Anonymous No.5264266]

>No Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I wish there were still opium dens everywhere.

[Anonymous No.5264275]

>>5264214
Guess he enjoyed the Byronic Heroin.

[Anonymous No.5264281]

>>5260971
dick was more mental illness.

[Anonymous No.5264284]

>>5261122
Dick did abuse speed but that was over the counter shit. It was mostly to get work done and all the other bullshit was just mental illness.

[Anonymous No.5264407]

>>5264196
>check out this edgy faggot

If you want to write then literally nothing beats copious quantities of black coffee and tobacco.

The jab/cross combo of the nicotine and caffeine really reduces you to a primal quibbling wreck and your words buzz and flow before you like animated butterflies that you don't fully understand in the moment but unveil deeper meaning in repeated sober reflection

[Yardley !o.baQwhE0c No.5264422]

>>5264407

This. Nothing beats the disoriented, disinhibited but utterly driven state I get into when 12 coffees into the day and not having slept in 48 hours.

[Anonymous No.5264432]

[Anonymous No.5264506]

>>5264057
>I wish alcohol had been illegal when I turned 21
>>5264065
>The world would be much better if it were illegal

"I want the government to storm in and imprison the billions of people who wish to possess and enjoy this naturally occurring molecule because I lack self control."

[Anonymous No.5264511]

>>5264422
>Nothing beats the disoriented, disinhibited but utterly driven state I get into when 12 coffees into the day
Really? I love a good cup of coffee, but anything near 12 and I start sweating, shaking, and having horrible anxiety.

[Anonymous No.5264514]

>>5264432
That was probably when butterfly was janitor.

[Anonymous No.5264524]

>ctrl f: ken kesey
>zero
>what the fuck

[Anonymous No.5264527]

>>5264511
yes and this is when you write best

(usually it's best to dictate into a tape recorder as handling a pen is probably out of the question at this point for and untrained set of fingers)

[Anonymous No.5264539]

>>5264524
kesey was certainly not a junkie, nor did he have any serious addictions as far as I know

[Anonymous No.5264742]

>>5264196
awful attempt, if you'd tried any of those you'd know that

[Anonymous No.5265082]

>fucked up due to medication for his syphilis (bismuth, mercury, arsenic)
>took laudanum, peyotl and mescaline

>died mad as fuck because of all that plus electroshocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYsrhJ-uqXU