15 Pop-Culture Masterpieces Brought to You by Drugs

Rolling Stone claims that the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the greatest album ever. While recording, they were mainly into weed, LSD and cocaine, had previously been very into benzedrine, and John Lennon later got hella into heroin.

Rolling Stone’s sixth best album ever, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On is a musically rich, socially conscious record made while high as balls on all the weed in the world. Everyone involved was chain-smoking, and the air was said to be damn near opaque.

Reformed boozehound Roger Ebert described drunken epic Withnail & I as “convey(ing) the experience of being drunk so well that the only way I could improve upon it would be to stand behind you and hammer your head with two-pound bags of frozen peas.”

During the making of Easy Rider, everyone was absolutely fucked. One story has it that, during production, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were so desperate for cocaine that they snorted an executive’s dead wife’s ashes. Five stars!

Hailed as one of the great American novels even if everyone in it is kind of a dick, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was written in three weeks, fueled by cigarettes, coffee, booze, benzedrine and — there had to be one innocent ingredient in there — pea soup.

Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas details exactly how many drugs he was on when writing it, in a famous list beginning, “We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline” and running too long to fit in this space.

Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was a troubled soul when he wrote and recorded Nevermind, addicted to heroin and vomiting daily. Somehow, within the chaos of his addiction and personal life, he came up with the best album of the decade. 

During the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. sessions (Rolling Stone’s seventh best record ever) the recording engineer found guitarist Keith Richards passed out with a needle sticking out of his arm. On poking, Richards sprang up and continued playing. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat did a lot of drugs while producing a shitload of work that now changes hands for millions. He eroded a hole in his septum through excessive cocaine use, and it was an accidental heroin overdose that brought his life to an early end. 

Dr. Dre’s The Chronic is in the Library of Congress. There are much druggier albums, and its violence is arguably more notable than its weed-drenched-ness, but it’s still called The Chronic and in the Library of Congress, that’s insane.

Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization is one of only 105 films to have a perfect 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. And good lord, everyone in it is completely fucked up at all times, including the doomed Darby Crash. 

Caddyshack does not have a perfect Tomatometer score, but Bravo claimed it was the second funniest film ever, which is masterpiece-y. Chevy Chase did so, so much cocaine making this film. Rodney Dangerfield did two lines in his audition. 

The F in F. Scott Fitzgerald didnt stand for “fucked-up,” but could have — he was hammered for two decades, which led to his death at 44. It’s difficult to read The Great Gatsby drunk — this motherfucker wrote it that way. 

Truman Capote drank martinis with breakfast and produced two unquestioned masterpieces in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. However, he may have peaked with this quote: “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.”

If you’re ever trying to find drugs and can’t find any, it’s possible the late Philip K. Dick did ‘em. He did a LOT, while producing endless works of genius. Confusing genius, yep. And he wasn’t happy. Still though, impressive!