Lenny Bruce, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, John Belushi, Keith Richards.
Jimmy Page
Sid Vicious
And Nancy Spungeon, although famous only because of her association with Sid.
Billie Holiday, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, William S. Burroughs.
Bill Maher had a line about getting down on your knees and thanking drugs every time you look at your record collection.
That was Bill Hicks, sir – may god rest his bitter, freakin’ hilarious soul.
Then Maher stole it from him, because I definitely first heard it from Maher. But credit where credit’s due!
Ray Charles
and River Phoenix
and Charlie Parker
Jerry Garcia
Boy George
Bela Lugosi
Edgar Allen Poe
Tom Sizemore
James Taylor
If I remember correctly, back in the 70s, Eric Clapton got clean and made an album (in that order.) The National Lampoon had a letter from the editor along the lines of (paraphrasing)
Dear Sir’s,
My last album proves drugs do make you play better.
Yours,
Eric Clapton
Disclaimer: it might not have been Eric Clapton, though that’s what I remember.
Rush Limbaugh was strung out on OxyContin, and that’s probably what made him deaf.
Louis Armstrong, bigtime (pot, anyway).
Hendrix, Chris Farley
Alma Rubens, Wallace Reid, Juanita Hansen . . .
Art Pepper, Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and pretty much every other jazz great of the 1950s.
And Aleister Crowley!
Sigmund Freud & Sarah Bernhardt (and, if fictional characters count, Sherlock Holmes) were cocaine addicts.
Billie Holliday used IV drugs.
Hermann Göring was addicted to morphine, heroin, codeine and other narcotics over the years (not all at once).
Evelyn Nesbit, in addition to being considered the world’s first supermodel, was also one of the first celebrity heroin addicts (after kicking morphine and cocaine).
Jean Cocteau and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were opium addicts.
Stevie Ray Vaughn
John Lennon? Are we defining “junkie” as anyone who ever used recreational drugs of any kind? I don’t remember ever hearing of Lennon being an addict.
Johnny Thunders