An epoch can be distinguished for the cultural features. For example, in Ancient Greece women dressed with peplums while in the sixties the hippies’ girls used maxi-skirt.

Kant thought that history evolved as a spiral and Fukuyama proposed just its end. In art, the Renaissance formal tendencies and contents are radically different from those of the artistic vanguards of the beginnings of the XX century. Inclusive, some people thinks that the prints of a period can identify as its music as its more popular drugs, even if the influence limits among both of them were the much defined.

It is according to this concept that the rock and the cocaine belonged to the 70's, to the 80's, the pop music and the Heroine, to the 90´s, the electronic music and the ecstasy. And, the first decade of the new millennium has been so eclectic as much with its narcotics as its fashions, music,mediatics escandals, literature, belligerencies, cinematographies, imminent cataclysms and new type ideologists.

It is difficult to obviate their presence and weight in a balance of our days, as more if you keep in mind that it is an essential item in the laundries and dirty handlings, of the worldwide economy.

Indeed, the relationship between drugs and artists has been and actually is narrow, sensual, more expensive and conflictive than some are prepared to recognize, although others –much more than less- have admitted and confessed it.

Sadie Plant, philosopher and writer, in her book Written with drugs, versed about the impact of these substances in the culture, mainly in the literary environment. According to Plant, the history of the literature would be different if the drugs were not existed: «It is very difficult to choose a XX century writer about whom you can assured that he didn't use opium.

At the beginning for writing the book, I began to look at writers that consumed and I finished looking at those that never made it. Opium was then a common substance that not only writers, intellectuals and artists but also workers used it. Everybody had opium at home».

Practically would be impossible to evaluate the wealth, the master degree or the inspiration granted by the hallucinogen consumption in artist's creative work. But it is almost sure from wider perspectives that the absence of drugs would have left a credit maybe, because they would not have died so many of them and, who knows, if they would have dedicated more time to the creative work.

Honoré de Balzac has shown him self against opium and its by-products consumption: «They absorb all the human energy,gather it in a single point, possess it, develop it in two or three times more, increasing it to an incredible potency and conceding to the whole being an ´empty´ creativity.

It confers to the senses the biggest possible pleasure, it stimulates them, it fatigues them, it consumes them. Consequently, opium consumption is a premeditated death». Balzac even arrived beyond further on its opposition to the addictions: he ended up affirming that «the tobacco, coffee and any liquor abuse produces serious dysfunctions and it causes a precocious death.»

According to medical texts, the drugs can alter nervous system functions:«the anaesthetics erase the pain; the tranquilizers calm the anguish; the hallucinogens, as the LSD, maybe enlarge the conscience, but they also deform the mind until taking it to the same madness.»

Something similar expressed Kurt Vonnegut about the force, the pain and the cynicism of a prose that transformed him into an icon of the American counter-culture, idolized, mainly by the students in the decades of the 60 and the 70: «Many people were as Dwayne: they produced chemical substances in their own bodies that harmed their heads. However, there were others, thousand of peoples in the city that bought artificial chemical products to eat them or to inhalate them -or to inject them in their veins (…) people experienced with these chemicals in their bodies because they wanted to improve their live quality. (…) The results have been catastrophic up to now - suicide, robbery, murder, and madness and more. Nevertheless, new chemicals arrive to the market the every minute.  

Van Gogh, Poe, Baudelaire, Lautrec, Manet, Wilde... Dalí, Lennon, Bukowski, Morrison, Warhol… were great artists that found frenzy and anguishes in drugs.

Janice Joplin, the eternal young woman with round glasses, the tender face girl and the potent voice that made her being strained suddenly in the musical landscape in giants era, became addicted to the Heroine that killed her while recorded her disk Pearl, diffused post mortem.

Elvis Presley, the Rock and Roll’s King, with just 42 years old, appeared dead, victim of an amphetamines overdose, in its bathtub with barbiturates. A man who was a sex symbol died with 130 kilos of weight.

Art feeds life. Philosophers and artists have coincided, each one from their point of sight and with diverse focuses, in that the creation centre stands in the perception; to create it is necessary to feel first. But for this the indispensable requirement is living life with all the possible impulse, and the intensity that drugs offer you is more similar to that of a shipwreck in the middle of the sea because of a storm.

In Trainspotting (1996), by Danny Boyle, Mark Trenton's character (Ewan McGregor), defines the bases of what would be his manifesto: «I chose not choosing life. I chose another thing… and the reasons: there are not reasons. Who does need reasons when you have Heroine?...»

While Joaquín Sabina travelled through Latin America in the promotional tour of his disk Mourning Relief, he declared to the press that he was recovering the passion for his work. He means writing songs, because without being three days and three whole nights without sleeping for cocaine consumptionand forgetting the depression that kept him out during four years with his guitar hided beside the bed, without recording neither one day. When he referred to the youths specifically that he admitted it: «Just in case it can be useful for the youngest people, I will say that after 20 years consuming cocaine, one day I said to me ¨never more¨, and I could leave it. I mean that you can leave drugs.»

 

Notes:

1 According to the (G-7) Financial Action Group, the annual sales of Cocaine, Heroine and Cannabis (marihuana) have ended up representing 120 thousand million dollars in United States and Europe.

2 Kurt Vonnegut, Champions' breakfast.