Famous junkies

[Spoke]

Evan Dando of The Lemonheads.

[panaccione]

The red hot chilli peppers. Under the bridge, one of their best songs ever, is all about it.

[darcy666]

@Sampiro

I don’t know if heroin was one of his drugs of choice (though he admits to having tried it along with almost every other drug there is), but George Carlin and his first wife were both addicts during the 1970s. They cleaned up late in the decade after arrests for possession when they were threatened with the removal of their teenaged daughter.

Some famous junkies by whichever definition (heroin specifically or narcotics in general):

MacKenzie Phillips and her “Papa John” Phillips. He was a despicable oxygen-thief who introduced her to hard drugs when she was a kid and allowed her to have sex with his roadies when she was an adolescent. (She claims she was raped by one of his bandmembers around this same period.) Most of her money from One Day at a Time went into her arm or up her nose, destroying a very promising career that has never regained full momentum. After several trips to rehab she got clean. He did also, but it took years and years and led to his death at a relatively young age.
At one point his ex-wife Michelle arrived to drop off their daughter Chynna for one of John’s custodial weekends and found John Phillips, Mackenzie Phillips and John’s third wife all so strung out that she not only took Chynna back home without dropping her off, but took Tam, Phillips’s son with his third wife, home with her as well.

Glenn Quinn had success as the oldest son-in-law on Roseanne and later as the half-demon sidekick on Angel and was part-owner of a very popular L.A. nightclub. His heroin addiction not only cost him his Angel job but he sank so low that he not only had to sell his nightclub share to partners but was banned from the place for asking patrons for money. He died of an overdose in a run-down apartment complex where he was crashing on a sofa three years after he was fired from Angel.

:smack:

[Sigmagirl]

Dr. John
Etta James

[Spoke]

Rumors have swirled around Johnny Depp, partly because of his association with River Phoenix. He was specifically asked about heroin use in an interview, and side-stepped the question:

“Were you doing heroin?”

Depp takes a deep breath. “Oh, let’s not talk about that…It was very sad time for me. I’ve never seen Gilbert Grape, actually. I can’t watch it.”

[darcy666]

i’m new to this board and unsure of how to quote and submit a reply back, so i am sorry to ouy guys for keeping leaving remarks under the john 'papa john’and mackenzie paragraph…i want to comment on my 'thank god for poppies or whatever dumb thing i wrote. in my defense, i just want to say i truly believe that much great art and music and literature has been written under the influence. and i’ve gone from recreational user to junkie and back anf forth for 17 years. i apologize if i offended anyone…

[darcy666]

@Don_Draper

I wouldn’t count Grace Slick. By her own confession, she is certainly a card-carrying, meeting-going alcoholic, and quite liberally used cocaine, LSD and other hallucinogens. But in her memoir, she says that heroin is the one drug she did stay away from. Even marijuana didn’t particularly interest her too much.

I don’t know if it’s true, but legend has it that Patsy Cline shot heroin when she was six months pregnant.

i think grace was just a cokehead drunk. not a junkie, right?

[cjepson]

@ccwaterback

(peraps ALL the Rolling Stones at one time or another?)

Mick, Charlie, and Bill – I don’t think so. (At least, as long as we’re using “junkie” to mean “opiate addict”. Bill was a sex junkie.)

[LonesomePolecat]

Hank Williams did morphine, in combination with alcohol and a lot of other stuff. That’s why he died at 29. Biographers maintain he used the drugs to relieve the pain of spina bifida.

Johnny Cash was a serious abuser of amphetamines.

[5-HT]

Andy Rourke, bassist for the Smiths
GG Allin
Shaun Ryder- The Happy Mondays
Layne Staley- Alice in Chains
Mitch Hedberg
Zac Foley- EMF
Keith Levene- The Clash, Public Image, Ltd.
Topper Headon- The Clash

[moth1416]

It remains news to me if either Petty or Carlin was ever a junkie.

I believe in the TP&tHB documentary, Petty says something about having a few bad years and abusing heroin after the breakup of his first marriage (around the time of the *Echo *album, which is a very depressing album). But then he met his second wife and it was all roses again. Or something. I need to watch that again.

[TriPolar]

William Rehnquist

[moth1416]

Re: Petty – I went back and checked, and what I was thinking of wasn’t the documentary, it was a 2006 Rolling Stone interview which simply said his friends were worried that he was doing heroin during that time, but all he says is that he was very depressed. Sorry for the mis-remembering. His bassist Howie Epstein certainly died of a heroin overdose, but I don’t know if he can be qualified as “famous.”

[BrainGlutton]

@5-HT

Mitch Hedberg

Near the end of his life I saw him perform at a comedy club in Tampa. He was so strung out he was reading jokes out of a three-ring binder. Still, it was a successful performance – you couldn’t have asked the audience to laugh harder. But somebody should have pulled him aside and explained: “Mitch, you’re unclear on the concept here. Your material is funnier when the audience is stoned.”

[BrainGlutton]

If we’re not limiting this to smack, American WWII hero Audie Murphy suffered from PTSD after the war, started taking sleeping pills, got hooked, and kicked by locking himself in a motel room for a week.

That must have been harder for him, and more frightening, than facing the German army in the field.

[Spoke]

Well if we’re including pills, Chevy Chase had a pain pill addiction.