John F. Kennedy was just 43 years old when he was elected, making him the second-youngest US president in history. But he was hardly the picture of health.
“The guy was essentially a walking pharmacy,” Sam Kelly writes in “Human History on Drugs: An Utterly Scandalous but Entirely Truthful Look at History Under the Influence” (Plume).
To combat his many ailments — ranging from bronchitis to agonizing back pain — JFK took a daily cocktail of drugs that included opioids, amphetamines, barbiturates, antibiotics and antipsychotics.
He also enjoyed recreational drugs like cocaine, marijuana and meth, “the latter of which he had injected directly into his throat,” writes Kelly.
“Robert Kennedy once joked: ‘If a mosquito bites my brother, the mosquito dies.’”
But, according to Kelly, JFK was no different from other historical icons.
“The truth is, many historical figures were on drugs: George Washington, Queen Victoria, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler — they were real people, with real flaws and real vices,” he writes.
The book covers 40 historical figures and their penchant for getting stoned, high and hammered. Elvis Presley took three suitcases of prescription drugs on tour. Alexander the Great drank large bowls of 40%-alcohol wine without ever diluting it with water.
Then there was Pope Leo XIII, the industrious late-nineteenth-century pontiff whose favorite tipple was wine laced with cocaine. “It was the papal equivalent of Popeye eating a can of spinach,” writes Kelly.
Founding father George Washington, meanwhile, couldn’t function without regular opium, in the form of the drug laudanum. He washed it down with high-strength alcohol, just to relieve the pain caused by his ill-fitting dentures.
More frightening, Richard Nixon used to drunk-dial cabinet members in the middle of the night and order them to nuke Cambodia, only for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to intervene and have the Pentagon shelve the matter until Nixon was sober.
“If the president had his way,” Kissinger once said, “there would be a nuclear war every week.”
Elsewhere, Kelly notes that Adolf Hitler took so much cocaine and the methamphetamine Perivitin that he didn’t even realize when the Germans started losing the war.
“Hitler was so astronomically high,” he writes, “he didn’t know it.”
Billionaire filmmaker and aviator Howard Hughes, meanwhile, was highly dependent on the painkiller codeine after a near-fatal plane crash in 1946. He suffered burns to 78% of his body, broke 54 bones and had his skull cleaved open by the impact.
Hughes made his personal physician write prescriptions to his aides, who then handed the pills over to him.
He also injected a liquid form of codeine straight into his muscles.
“This became such a habitual practice that after Hughes died, an autopsy found five broken-off hypodermic needles embedded in his arms,” notes Kelly.
For mavericks like Hughes, the decision to take drugs, whether recreational or medicinal, was a way to unleash clearer, more creative thinking. It’s why, says Kelly, the pop artist Andy Warhol took them, even though he claimed he refrained.
Warhol’s drug of choice was meth, in the form of diet pill Obetrol. While he didn’t have a weight problem, Obetrol was also a powerful stimulant that combined methamphetamine with regular amphetamine.
In other words, pure medical-grade speed.
“He was popping diet pills like candy,” Kelly writes. “Andy was, by nature, intense, passionate, and focused — and the meth hyper-accentuated those qualities.
“He was essentially using methamphetamine as a performance-enhancing drug.”
It was a similar experience that Apple founder Steve Jobs had when he discovered LSD, claiming it was one of the “two or three most important things he ever did in his life.”
Jobs had dabbled with acid since his senior year in high school but upped his intake after a spiritual pilgrimage to India to learn about Zen Buddhism.
His drug use was key to his approach to business. “At Apple, we want to make computers that will change the world. We want to put a ding in the universe,” he said.
“That’s what he thought LSD did for him,” Kelly writes. “[It] expanded his mind, granted him insight, and enabled him to see the bigger picture.”
