With very little effort one finds well known substance abusers in positions of leadership and of course the arts.

Consider Alcohol and the great lushes in History such as Churchill. Where would Winston and the British Empire's finest hour have been without that bottle of light white wine to start off the day, moving on to the distillates. Oliver Reed, Robert Shaw, Lee Marvin, the Barrymores all well known lushes of Hollywood. Could they have been accomplished without lushdom? Dean Martin I prefer to believe; he played the role but, was not a lush. Although he no doubt knew how to party at times as his buds required.

And to imagine ole Hollywood without amphetamine driven writers, actors, etc. There would have been no Gone With The Wind without Benzedrine.

Opium augmented dreams of Xanadu or "the tell tale heart".

Absinthe as helped keep the Gay Nineties Gay (gay, use archaic definition) and Impressionist full of impressions. May have influenced the Sci/Fi of the time too.

So for all those Bravo I don't need no substances, people - would you really want to live in a substance free world? Dullsville. Then again you may exist "high" endogenously like cruising the border of hypoglycemia or being in a ketotic energy high. Probably the caveman's usual consciousness. You, substance free persons, may be in such an endogenous state as to alter your perception of the absolute truth. Just as the substance users are said to represent.

And the straw that encouraged me to create this upload is the following sucrose appreciation effort.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/oreo-cameo ... slideshow/

Although those people are hard to be around when their sugar crashes, and the adrenalin kicks in.

Not just Weed but, the pan substance thread. Exogenous and endogenous included.

Moi

Mormons and Christians count as endogenously high, as does meditation.

PM me for inquiries to absolute truth.

I am aware that some world leaders drank but I maintain that the best decisions come when your sober not when your high on something. Maybe that comes from seeing people in convalescent hospitals sitting in wheel chairs staring at the wall and only in there 20's of my next door neighbor's son who lived two places away, his brother died of an overdose and he is permanently zoned out because of the drugs. Of people I have know that died of such horrid death like sclerosis of the liver because they literally drank themselves to death, go to the hospital and dry out for a month only to find a bottle the minute they get out. Add smoking where if you don't die of lung cancer like my brother did, or Christina our own chat room lady, or Seriously Curious who we have not seen sense April and I am going to guess we lost another friend, sister, member of this site, or you end up using an Oxygen bottle to breath with for the last ten years of your life because your lungs have crystallized, like Johny Carson and others.

No I am sorry I don't find any romance in abusing any substance of see the need to glorify it or those who use it like the singer they just put in the ground in the UK she was 27, she was not the first, and sadly wont be the last like River Phoenix, or John Belushi or Janice Joplin or even John Denver who if I remember you bashed for this not a month ago.

I don't find it fun or have a wow factor in it, I just find it sad.

River

YES!

No doubt "bad things" happen associated with drugs & alcohol. Remember the hair to the Getty estate.

Does that totally discredit the link between substance induced altered states with creativity?

Bad things happen with carbohydrates, too. Slow death with weight gain, diabetes and subsequent complications as may include vascular disease causing coronary occlusion, stroke, limb loss, kidney failure, blindness, impotence, etc. What shall we do?

Moi

go eat a carrot.

River

YES!

moi621 (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2011 3:28 pm No doubt "bad things" happen associated with drugs & alcohol. Remember the hair to the Getty estate.

Does that totally discredit the link between substance induced altered states with creativity?

Bad things happen with carbohydrates, too. Slow death with weight gain, diabetes and subsequent complications as may include vascular disease causing coronary occlusion, stroke, limb loss, kidney failure, blindness, impotence, etc. What shall we do?

Moi

go eat a carrot.

River

But there is no established link between altered states and creativity; you're just making that up, or more properly accepting a Romantic myth. Logically, your argument has beciome circular because it rests on assuming the thing your are trying to prove. Certainly people in altered states believe they are creative (just as drunks believe that they are sexy and fascinating conversationalists), but there is no evidence for either belief. In real life no one finds a drunk sexy or entertaining. There is no evidence that any great work of art or fiction was actually composed in an altered state. Usually the effects of alcohol or hallucinogens is to warp perception and the products of such altered states lack artistic integrity. The drunken, slurring Judy Garland is a vastly different thing from the controlled voice that sings "Get Ready for the Judgment Day" in Summer Stock. Though Coleridge claimed that he composed Kubla Khan in a state of revery, there is no evidence to support the claim. And Coleridge's life is really a rather sad story of unfulfilled promise. He never completed the unified literary theory promised in the Literaria Biographia, and apart from his youthful works like Kubla Khan or Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the last years of his life as an opium addict are singularly devoid of any works of art at all. Rather stimulate creativity, Coleridge's sad case seems to demonstrate the opposite; the drugs altered his creativity to zero. And if he hadn't been stoned, it is likely that he would have been conscious of being that saddest of all beings, an artistic failure. Certainly Bach was in his right mind when he composed the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C-major and Beethoven wasn't high when he composed the Ninth Symphony, which surely rank much higher on the scale of creativity than anything Janis Joplin dashed off stoned or sober; there is no evidence that Vermeer was high when he painted thirty-six of the world's great paintings, and though it is fashionable to admire van Gogh for his troubled life and antics, interesting as it is, the Irises (probably his best work) has real problems with the formal elements of composition, the balance of light and dark, the movement of light, and the van Gogh at the Norton Simon is an obviously amateurish work with the tree dividing the canvas right down the middle of the composition. You are engaged in a Romantic view of art as the expression of inspiration or emotion, but the best of the Romantics were still trained as craftsmen with conscious control over their medium. Even in the most minimal way, Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) exercised some feeble effort at control by cutting the drippings to achieve a balance rather than just dripping paint all over a canvas. The only thing Pollock's alcoholism did was set the stage for a fatal motorcycle crash (fortunately the tree survived) and cause his patron's investments to increase in value. But if art is intended to be art and not a cash cow, then when Jack was drinking, he wasn't able to paint, so even in his case there is no connection between bad behavior and creativity.

Okay, so dispute the associations of the 18th and 19th century.

The Twentieth Century and Hollywood are better documented.

Selznick, Benzedrine, Gone With the Wind. Spencer Tracy was also Rx Bennies.

Robert Shaw, Oliver Reed, Lee Marvin - lushes.

Say it ain't so.

Moi

The ancient Persians had an intelligent take on this. They believed that any great undertaking should be considered first intoxicated, then sober. Without the intoxication there would be none of the soaring heights of whimsical creativity, but without the sober consideration all plans can be brought low by stoned stupidity.

And on creativity and being high, I am sorry but the connection is welll established. Show me a major American novelist who wasn't an alcoholic. Hemmingway, check. Faulkner, check, Gertrude Stein, high on Alice Toklas' brownies made with tons of butte,r sugar, and seven grams of hash. Sherwood Anderson, check. Most playwrights, the same.

Among the oldest writings of the human race is the Hymn to Soma from the Rig Veda, a song of praise to the primeval intoxicant"

1. THIS, even this was my resolve, to win a cow, to win a steed:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

2. Like violent gusts of wind the draughts that I have drunk have lifted me

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

3. The draughts I drank have borne me up, as fleet-foot horses draw a car:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

4. The hymn hath reached me, like a cow who lows to meet her darling calf:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

5. As a wright bends a chariot-seat so round my heart I bend the hymn:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

6. Not as a mote within the eye count the Five Tribes of men with me:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

7. The heavens and earth themselves have not grown equal to one half of me

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

8. I in my grandeur have surpassed the heavens and all this spacious earth

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

9. Aha! this spacious earth will I deposit either here or there

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

10. In one short moment will I smite the earth in fury here or there:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

11. One of my flanks is in the sky; I let the other trail below:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

12. 1, greatest of the Mighty Ones, am lifted to the firmament:

Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

13. I seek the worshiper's abode; oblation-bearer to the Gods:

Religious anthropologists have noted that at their origins, almost all religions are associated with psychotropic drugs. The Sufi's speak of intoxication with God. The association of creativity and intoxication is ancient and almost universal.

Transward

Moi, look, substance abuse in leaders only cause to look at laws or potential laws and think:

"what were they smoking?"

Yes, of all the great work Tracy did, think of how much more he could have done had he not been a falling down drunk. If you want to compare the difference look at all the stuff Clint Eastwood has done and is still doing, cold sober. Judy Garland one of the best female singers of all time, but between 1943 and her death there were years where nothing happened, think of what she could have done if she was not drunk. What could have been?

You argue that because they were high they did great works, when I argue that had they not been high they could have done so much more. One other thing seems to be true about such artiest is that they had short lives or lives cut short because of they were high on something other then life.

Janice Joplin, John Belushi, Amy Winehouse who died last week at 27, Drugs did not make her a great singer, drugs killed a great singer.

River

Tw. Thank You. One can only wonder what Ezekiel was on.

fhunter, You might search out a history channel program, "High Hitler". Of course American politicians never believed prohibition included them while busting folk for procession of alcohol.

River, NO I did not say "

Riverwind (imported) wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2011 3:28 am You argue that because they were high they did great works

". I did say the association with some is certainly there. Eastwood's art would no doubt deteriorate intoxicated just as Chevy Chase's did because he was no longer intoxicated. My wife made life hell over alcohol. I am not going to diss alcohol, etc. over horrific years of being a psych nurse - 24/7.

YES she got all the help money could buy. And an AA counselor she liked. Individual responsibility is the issue. And failing to do so can lead to a vegetative state or death as you know. (we are separated, I send money)

For a good time, look up the rum rations of the Founding Fathers at the Continental Congress at whose expense? Colonial rum rations might help the current debt crisis achieve compromise. Like the 18th & 19th Century British Navy, Congressman should be required to take their medicine whenever Congress is in session, in the Spirit of the Founding Fathers.

Moi