Keith Richards
Best
known as the lead guitarist of the British rock group The Rolling Stones, Keith
Richards has been recognized for decades as being among the most innovative and
talented guitar players in modern history. He is at least as famous, if not
more so, for the fact that he was for many years living in the grips of a
massive addiction to heroin and cocaine. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Richards
spoke candidly about his drug use and would often perform while high. He was
arrested and ended up in court on drug-related charges five times between 1967
and 1978, with the final trial resulting from a 1977 arrest in Toronto, Canada
where he was found with heroin in the hotel room where he was staying with his
current wife and children. This arrest led to Richards entering a drug rehab
program to recover from his addiction to heroin. In the years since then, it
has been revealed that despite the fact that he had many other factors which
would motivate most people to quit drugs -- including his arrests and the
drug-related deaths of several friends -- what finally gave him the purpose he
needed to get sober was his realization that drugs were getting in the way of
his music.
David Bowie
David Bowie has been a superstar in the music industry since
his rise to fame with the 1969 hit “Space Oddity.” He has gone out of his way
for much of his career to present himself as an oddity, wearing bizarre
costumes and even creating eccentric stage personas such as “Ziggy Stardust”
and the “Thin White Duke.” During the first half of the 1970s, Bowie’s
outlandish behavior was to a large degree fueled by a continually increasing
addiction to cocaine. As he became more and more hooked on the drug, he began
to waste away physically, as well as developing emotional and mental disorders
including paranoia. In 1976, Bowie overdosed on cocaine several times in short
succession, and his drug addiction had progressed to the degree that he was
becoming incoherent during publicly broadcasted interviews. Soon after this
point, however, Bowie received custody of his young son, a life change which
provided him with sufficient motivation to quit, and he has not since touched
cocaine. In a recent interview, the musician states that he wishes that he had
followed the advice which he received at age 18 to never use drugs.
Stevie Nicks
The lead singer of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks spent a large
portion of her adult life addicted to drugs, beginning with cocaine and ending
with a psychiatric tranquilizer medication. Nicks first tried cocaine in 1973,
shortly before she joined the group and was launched to stardom. At this time,
she was told that cocaine was a purely recreational drug and was not addictive,
but she soon found that this was far from the truth. For more than a decade,
she engaged in ongoing cocaine abuse, until the point in 1986 when a plastic
surgeon warned her that if she snorted cocaine one more time she would likely
drop dead. Determined to recover from her addiction to cocaine, Nicks began
seeing a psychiatrist who placed her on a series of increasingly powerful
tranquilizers, starting with Valium, progressing to Xanax and finally ending up
with Klonopin. Ms. Nicks spent eight years addicted to Klonopin, and now makes
a point of spreading the message about the dangers of this drug in nearly every
public interview, stating that it ruined her life and in all likelihood was the
reason why she never married and had a child. Nicks says of this psychiatric
drug that it turned her into a zombie, and that it made her gain considerable
amounts of weight and suffer from severe depression.
Finally, she made the decision to get her life back under
control and checked into rehab to free herself from the grips of Klonopin, and
she describes her experience detoxifying from the drug as though someone opened
a door and pushed her into Hell. During her 47 days of rehab, Nicks received
inspiration from a photo of her young niece, a picture which motivated her to
push through to the end so that she could be there for the girl.
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