Drug Users
Because of its criminalization and stigma, most successful recreational drug users do not have the courage to share this part of their lives. One of the few areas where drug users are not blackballed is in the arts - actors, musicians, etc. Because of this there is an abundance of artists that are "out of the closet," and their inclusion will not be a focus of this assembly.
Amphetamine
current United States Air Force pilots
Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister)
Anthony Eden (British Prime Minister)
President John F. Kennedy
World War II & Vietnam veterans
Barbiturate
John Kenneth Galbraith (economist)
Anne Sexton (poet)
Mao Zedong (revolutionary)
Cocaine
Frédéric Bartholdi (architect of Statue of Liberty)
President George W. Bush
Thomas Edison
Sigmund Freud
President Ulysses S. Grant
Pope Leo XIII
Barack Obama (senator)
Robert Louis Stevenson (writer)
Jules Verne (first sci-fi writer)
Malcolm X
LSD
Note: LSD was chemically isolated in a laboratory by Albert Hofmann in 1943. It was likely used prior to this in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece and Rome. (LSD is derived from ergot, a fungus found on grain. The potion used in the ceremonies (kykeon) was made from grain and the Eleusinian Mysteries honored the goddess of grain, Demeter.) For more on this topic see the book co-authored by Albert Hofmann, The Road to Eleusis.
Richard Branson (CEO, self-made billionaire)
Aristotle
Cicero
Douglas Englebart (invented computer mouse)
Richard Feynman (Nobel laureate in physics)
Michel Foucault (philosopher)
Bill Gates
Cary Grant
Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder/CEO, self-made billionaire)
Mitch Kapor (software pioneer)
Robert Kennedy
Francis Krick (Nobel laureate in physiology)
Groucho Marx
Kary Mulis (Nobel laureate in chemistry)
Anaďs Nin (writer)
Plato
Sophocles
Marijuana
Louis Armstrong (musician)
Michael Bloomberg (NYC mayor, self-made billionaire)
Susan Blackmore (psychologist)
Richard Branson (CEO, self-made billionaire)
President George W. Bush
President Bill Clinton
Richard Feynman (Nobel laureate in physics)
Gustave Flaubert (novelist)
Bill Gates
Newt Gingrich
Vice President Al Gore
Stephen Jay Gould (paleontologist)
Victor Hugo (writer)
Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder/CEO, self-made billionaire)
President John F. Kennedy
Peter Lewis (CEO, self-made billionaire)
Jack London (author)
Edgar Allan Poe
Carl Sagan (astronomer)
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Shakespeare
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)
Clarence Thomas (Supreme Court Justice)
Queen Victoria
President George Washington
William Wordsworth (poet)
Jesse Ventura (Navy SEAL, governor)
Pancho Villa (revolutionary)
John Wayne
Oscar Wilde
Malcolm X
Opiates
(opium, unless noted)
Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor/philosopher)
Jane Addams (reformer)
Louisa May Alcott (morphine)
Honoré de Balzac (writer)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poet)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet)
Charles Dickens
Gustave Flaubert (novelist)
Benjamin Franklin
King George IV
William Gladstone (British Prime Minister)
Edmond Halley (astronomer)
Hippocrates
Thomas Jefferson
Rush Limbaugh (OxyContin)
Jack London
Florence Nightingale (nurse, morphine)
Charlie Parker (heroin)
Pablo Picasso
Plotinus
Edgar Allan Poe
Marcel Proust (writer)
Sir Walter Scott (writer)
William Wilberforce (reformer)
Oscar Wilde
Others
William James (psychologist/philosopher, nitrous oxide, mescaline)
President Richard Nixon (Dilantin)
Pancho Villa (mescaline)
Most information taken from You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos, Book I by Robert R. Arthur. Detailed documentation of sources can be found therein.
Page last modified May 11, 2008.