25 Notable Extremes Musicians Were Driven To By Drugs

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Classic rock juggernaut Pink Floyd was originally, without question, Syd Barrett's band. He wrote 10 out of 11 songs on Floyd's landmark debut Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and his haunting vocals and experimental guitar work (on the mono mix of Piper, you can hear him rolling ball bearings down the strings of his guitar) made the album an arresting masterpiece. But almost as soon as he arrived on the British rock scene, he became its most famous acid casualty. Frequent use of LSD rendered him unable to function, particularly in live performance with the band. He'd spend entire concerts playing one chord, de-tuning his guitar and, most memorably, melting an entire tube of Brylcreem in his hair under a stage light. Audiences thought all this was funny, but his fellow band members were incensed, particularly fledgling control-freak Roger Waters, Floyd's bassist.

The band brought in David Gilmour as a second guitarist; soon to be its only guitarist. Barrett contributed only one song to Pink Floyd's second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, called "Jugband Blues," which saw Barrett sadly acknowledging his gradual ouster from the band by singing, "It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here. And I'm much obliged to you for making it clear that I'm not here." The band officially terminated Barrett in April 1968, but to their credit, Waters and Gilmour attempted to assist Barrett as he began recording his first solo album the following month. The result, the aptly titled The Madcap Laughs, was packed with great songs and performances but Barrett's singing and songwriting had become even more harrowing. A second, final solo album followed before Barrett dropped out of sight forever. Decades passed with no word from him as his former band became a massively successful arena act. When Barrett died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 it felt strange, as in a way he was already long gone.

Sly and the Family Stone's first four albums were the work of a man in total control of his talents and craft. By the time of his band's fourth album, the monumental Stand!, Sly Stone was applying remarkable discipline to his work: writing, performing on, producing and arranging all songs.

But with the massive success of Stand! and the band's subsequent appearance at Woodstock came a big change in Stone and, as a result, his band. He became addicted to cocaine among other substances, and supposedly kept a violin case filled with drugs with him constantly. Stone's Bel Air mansion took on a cult-like atmosphere, with Stone dispensing drugs to his fellow band members and assorted hangers-on.

Some of the band's next album, There's A Riot Goin' On, was recorded in a home studio here, with Stone recording much of his vocals lying down. He'd also allow groupies to sing over the album's tapes as "auditions," then once he'd had his way with these women, send them on their way and wipe the tape. This eventually diluted the fidelity of the actual recordings themselves, contributing to the album's murky sound. Given all this chaos, it's a testament to Stone's talents that the resulting album is still one of the greatest ever made.

Stone made a half-dozen further albums of varying quality after this; by the end of the '70s he'd started giving them sad titles like "Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back and Back On The Right Track" and the songs contained within were largely lame retreads of his earlier material. In the 1980s, Sly basically disappeared. He'd pop up for an occasional live performance, cameo on someone else's album or arrest for cocaine possession, but beyond that was rarely seen.

In the mid-2000s there were hints of a comeback; he appeared with his old band and other musicians for a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone at the 2006 Grammy awards, but Stone left the stage before the performance was over. In 2011, reports surfaced that Stone was homeless and living in a van in L.A. He was quoted as saying, "I like my small camper. I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving."

In the annals of rock musicians fucking up, few entries are more extreme than stabbing your girlfriend to death and claiming not to remember doing it later. In October 1978, bassist Sid Vicious—deep into heroin addiction; his band Sex Pistols having broken up earlier that year—woke up in his room at the Hotel Chelsea in New York to find his girlfriend Nancy Spungen dead in the bathroom with a wound in her abdomen. It was concluded that Vicious' knife, which had gone missing along with Spungen's money, was the murder weapon.

Vicious was charged with murder and gave conflicting accounts of what had happened; he said he hadn't stabbed Spungen, then that he couldn't remember anything and then that they were fighting and she fell on the knife. He was arrested and charged with murder but not kept in custody and attempted suicide later that month. In December 1978 he got in a fight at a rock show and was arrested and jailed; bailed out in February 1979. The following day, he died of an overdose of his mother's heroin at a dinner party. He was cremated and his mother surreptitiously spread his remains over Spungen's grave.

Stone Temple Pilots might have been initially seen as a contrived grunge act by critics, but their frontman, Scott Weiland, sure matched Seattle's finest in drug consumption. He began using heroin with singer Gibby Haynes while STP was on tour with the Butthole Surfers in 1994. The following year he was arrested while buying crack cocaine.

While on probation, he moved into a hotel room next to Courtney Love, and claims the two began doing drugs together. In 1998, he was arrested buying heroin, reportedly while dressed as a pimp. In 2003, he got in a car crash while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, but charges were dismissed after he successfully completed rehab. Thereafter, Weiland transitioned to DUIs with arrests in '07 and '08, the latter incident involving jail time.

During all this, he was in and out of STP, launched a solo career and, in 2003, joined Velvet Revolver, a supergroup comprised of himself and three former members of Guns N' Roses, definitely great guys to hang around while trying to kick a drug habit. In 2011, he cut a Christmas album—go figure.

Musicians' drug problems are often rich sources of satire for comedians, but no one has ever been sent up as thoroughly and hysterically as Rick James. A 2004 episode of Chappelle's Show saw Eddie Murphy's older brother Charlie describing James' antics during their long friendship as Dave Chappelle reenacted all this dressed as James. He's depicted cavorting with loose women, licking their faces and rejecting their breasts; fucking up a couch; and punching and slapping Murphy in the face and in turn getting beat up repeatedly. Murphy terms James "a habitual line stepper," and all the while the real Rick James appears intermittently to offer little more explanation for his behavior than "cocaine's a hell of a drug."

Of course in reality, James' drug tales were much darker. In 1992, James and his girlfriend were accused of holding a woman hostage for a week, binding her, forcing her to perform sex acts and burning her with a crack pipe. In 1993, while out on bail for all this, the two did the same thing to a female music executive and were arrested again. James was found guilty of both offenses and sentenced to two years in prison; released in 1996. He later lost $2 million in a civil suit related to the case.

The same year the Chappelle's Show episode dedicated to him aired, James died of heart failure. An autopsy found nine different drugs in his bloodstream when he died; a mixture of prescription and illegal drugs. Cocaine was one of them.

Red Hot Chili Peppers' drug story is uniquely repetitive. It basically goes like this: Their guitarist has an adverse reaction to success, gets addicted to heroin and disappears—they've been through this twice. First, in 1988, after releasing their third album, the band's first to hit the Billboard chart, Peppers' lead singer Anthony Kiedis and guitarist Hillel Slovak had developed serious drug addictions. Slovak died from this in June 1988 and Kiedis was too gone to attend his funeral. RHCP regrouped, but drummer Jack Irons quit, saying he couldn't handle the level of tragedy surrounding the band.

The band eventually replaced Irons with Chad Smith and Slovak with guitarist John Frusciante, and went on to record and release the most successful albums of its career; Mother's Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The latter album spawned four huge singles and launched the band on the charts, radio, MTV, television appearances and stadium tours. Frusciante wasn't comfortable this level of success and said so, and began behaving and even playing erratically. He and Kiedis stopped speaking and he quit the band while touring Japan in 1993.

The Peppers, meanwhile, moved on; the Spinal Tap-esque nature of the band's guitar slot continued as it played Lollapalooza with one guitarist, fired him and hired another, fired him and finally recruited Jane's Addiction's Dave Navarro to play Woodstock '94 and record an album. Navarro left the band because, as he later joked to Kurt Loder, "I don't make funny faces." Surprisingly, Frusciante, newly, firmly sober, returned for three more albums with the band before departing again. As usual, RHCP got a new guitarist and kept at it.

When Motley Crue went on tour with Ozzy Osbourne in 1984, the Crue found they'd finally met their match in terms of excess, particularly drug consumption. Tommy Lee later recounted pulling into a hotel in Florida after having been up all night with Ozzy drinking and snorting cocaine. The story goes that the musicians spotted a line of ants outside the bus and as Motley Crue looked on in disbelief, Ozzy leapt to the ground and snorted the entire thing with a straw.

Most of the time though, Osbourne was ingesting things more addictive than fire ants. By his own admission, he was a practicing alcoholic and drug abuser for 40 years and is as surprised as anyone that he survived it all. When he was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, he locked himself in a hotel room for three months to binge on drugs and alcohol (listening to Sabbath's terrible albums of the late '70s, it's difficult to see why he was so upset). He got it back together to start a successful solo career but continued to run off the rails of the "Crazy Train"; in the early '80s he legendarily urinated on the Alamo and was arrested and banned from San Antonio, Texas, and in the late '80s he almost murdered his wife Sharon while high.

By the time Osbourne began appearing on the reality show about his family, The Osbournes, in 2002, most of the madness seemed to be behind him but the effect of four decades of depravity was evident; on the show, Ozzy is depicted as largely unintelligible and nearly deaf.

When Ol' Dirty Bastard leapt into pop culture consciousness on the Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), boasting "Beetle Bailey rhymes" like "I'm cherry bombing shits, boom!/Just warming up a little bit, vroom vroom," it was clear he either on drugs, or just insane. Not to take away from his skills and artistry, but as the events of the next decade revealed, it was a bit of both. 

More than that, the idiosyncratic, reductive nature of his songwriting and worldview, combined with his limited discography (he released just two terrific solo albums during a decade when most other rappers glutted the market with product), made him a living legend. The problem was his life itself was out of control. He had seven children; Wu-Tang leader RZA said he once witnessed Dirty force his son to watch him use drugs.

According to the FBI file on the Wu-Tang Clan, ODB was arrested nine times between 1987 and 1999 for crimes ranging from petty larceny (he tried to steal a $50 pair of shoes while carrying $500 in cash) to attempted first-degree murder. In the last six years of his life, he continued to be arrested frequently for drug possession (he was once caught with marijuana and 20 vials of crack cocaine and reportedly asked the cops to "make the rocks disappear"). He didn't tone it down for his many court appearances on drug charges; he once asked a female prosecutor "Do I make you horny?" before falling asleep in court.

In 2000 he escaped from court-mandated rehab and attended a record release party for the Wu-Tang Clan's third album. Within a month he was caught and sentenced two to four years in prison. He regained his freedom in 2003 but was too damaged to survive much longer. In November 2004 he died of an overdose of cocaine and the prescription drug tramadol.

With his wide-eyed, shaky demeanor, Neil Young just has the look about him of a guy on drugs. The thing is that's probably more the effect of his lifelong struggles with epilepsy than anything else. He's definitely done his share; last year, the story broke that he'd finally quit smoking pot and drinking—at 66-years-old—to write his memoir. And he's created some great music ruminating on the ill effects of addiction; his 1971 song "The Needle and the Damage Done" is one of the most poignant ever written about heroin, and his 1975 album Tonight's The Night eulogized his roadie Bruce Berry and guitarist Danny Whitten, both of whom died of heroin overdoses in 1973.

Despite all this, Young has generally avoided a reputation for doing heavy drugs himself. However, there have been some close calls. When he appeared in the Band's concert film The Last Waltz in 1976, Young was apparently snorting cocaine backstage directly before his performance. In Band drummer Levon Helm's autobiography, he wrote, "Neil Young had delivered a good version of 'Helpless,' but performed with a good-size rock of cocaine stuck in his nostril. Neil's manager saw this and said no way is Neil gonna be in the film like this. They had to go to special effects people, who developed what they called a 'travelling booger matte' that sanitized Neil's nostril and put 'Helpless' into the movie." As a result, that crumb of cocaine is surely one of the most expensive ever snorted.

In its episode of VH1's Behind The Music, Motley Crue broke down its backstage dynamic during the band's initial wave of success: "The girls would come in and we'd go, 'Vince Neil,' and the drug dealers would come in and we'd go 'Tommy and Nikki.'" Guitarist Mick Mars was too hobbled by ankylosing spondylitis to live it up and as for Neil, he certainly indulged but was more into groupies and drinking.

In 1984, driving to get more booze while partying with the rest of the band, Neil wrecked his sports car, killing his passenger, Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle, and seriously injuring the two passengers in the other car. Neil was charged with DUI and vehicular manslaughter but plead out and was sentenced to the Theatre Of Pain tour. Three years later, bassist Nikki Sixx turned in the band's scariest drug story in a career full of them when he let his drug dealer shoot him up, overdosed and died. A doctor revived him, and he left the hospital against medical advice and was driven home by crying fans. Once there, he changed the outgoing message on his answering machine and took what he said later was the biggest dose of heroin he'd ever had.

In Motley Crue's 2001 book The Dirt, Sixx described the aftermath: "I woke up the next afternoon sprawled across the bathroom floor with the needle still dangling out of my arm. The tile floor was covered with blood. My blood. I passed out again. Somewhere, far away, a phone rang. 'Hey, it's Nikki. I'm not home because I'm dead.'"

When Michael Jackson's hair caught fire after a pyrotechnic device malfunctioned above his head while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984, at the time it seemed like a fluke accident that he quickly moved on from. But his process of recovery profoundly affected his life in two ways. One, it got him started on altering his appearance through cosmetic surgery. Two, it gave him his first exposure to prescription painkillers. For the next quarter-century, Jackson's reliance on drugs vacillated.

In times of stress, he abused them and engaged in hardcore financial malfeasance to numb himself from the mental toll of being repeatedly accused of child molestation and surrounded by a galaxy of managers, lawyers, Arab royalty and entertainment industry players eager to get a piece of him—none more ruthless about it than his own family. But most of all, he used drugs to sleep.

A star of Jackson's stature didn't get drugs like an ordinary person. He'd shop for a doctor and then use him to get what he needed conveniently. It was this type of arrangement that led him to get addicted to propofol, a hypnotic form of anesthesia that induces a deep sleep but that is only safe when administered in a clinical setting. Jackson used this as casually as NyQuil, referring to it as "my milk."

In June 2009, while preparing for a series of concerts at London's O2 Arena that would have either been a massive comeback or giant fiasco (we'll never really know which) Jackson's doctor, Conrad Murray, put him under with propofol and he never came back. He was 50 years old. Conrad is now serving time in prison for charges related to Jackson's death.

In 1980, Meat Puppets began a promising career as a punk band formed by two brothers, Curt and Cris Kirkwood, informed by rambling classic rock influences like Neil Young and the Grateful Dead. As the next two decades unfolded, they released one of the most perfect albums ever made, Meat Puppets II, joined Nirvana for its Unplugged appearance to back the band on the Puppets' own songs and even scored a radio-friendly hit with "Backwater." But by the end of the '90s, Puppets bassist Cris Kirkwood was intensely addicted to heroin. His wife died of an overdose in 1998.

In 2003, there was an incident outside the post office in Phoenix, Ariz. Speaking to The Onion A.V. Club in 2007, Kirkwood summarized this as follows: "I went to the post office to mail some crap. This lady got mad at me in the parking lot because I wanted her to back up and she wouldn't. Then she got out and yelled at me so I told her to fuck off. I was real fat, I didn't have any teeth. I was a mess, just an imposing, scary, dope-abuser. She got the security guard in my face. I tried to cool it off, it wasn't happening. I tried to leave, he followed me out saying shit, I told him to fuck off, he pushed me, I belted him, he whacked me with his stick, I took it away from him and hit him with it, pushed him again, turned around and tried to split, and he shot me in the back."

After being hospitalized, Kirkwood spent 21 months in prison. Less than a year after his release, despite significant skepticism from Curt that Cris had changed, he returned to the Puppets for a successful run of albums and tours. He's now ten years clean and sober.

You've got to feel for Marianne Faithfull. At the age of 17, she was snapped up by the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham merely for being "an angel with big tits" and shoved at the Stones. She churned out some blandly alluring pop records but was most famously Mick Jagger's girlfriend and muse. When the police raided Keith Richards' Redlands mansion in 1967 as its occupants concluded an epic acid trip, they claimed they found Faithfull wrapped in nothing but a rug with a candy bar inserted in her vagina (Richards debunked this myth in his 2010 book Life).

She co-wrote the tellingly titled "Sister Morphine," only to see the Stones wrest control of the song and release it, without crediting her, on their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. By the end of the '70s she was homeless, living in an abandoned building in London. It was a fate once unthinkable for a woman so beautiful and sexual that still images of her alone created a media sensation and who directly influenced one of the most significant bands of her generation and place. But Faithfull got the last laugh.

Given the opportunity to cut another album, she turned in the raw, confessional Broken English; an unflinching narrative of what it was like for a glamour model and pop star to find herself an addict living on the street, all backed by understated yet fashionable musical accompaniment. The Stones of this era were singing about "Some Girls," and this was first person reporting from one they'd cast off.

Few musicians' experiences with drug abuse have been as complex and intense as Kurt Cobain's. For proof of this, see the index of Charles Cross' 2001 Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven. If you check, "Cobain, Kurt Donald; drug use of..." you'll basically be instructed to read the entire book. He started off heavily averse to heroin; during his formative years, a friend suggested they try it and he stopped hanging out with him in response. He eventually tried the drug; when asked how it was by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, he shrugged, "Oh, it was all right." But his habit escalated.

By the time Nirvana appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1992, Cobain was so deep in heroin addiction that he was vomiting and barely able to stand right until the time came to perform. He somehow pulled it together long enough to play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Territorial Pissings" on live television. In March 1994, Cobain attempted suicide for the first time by washing down a large dose of flunitrazepam with champagne while in Rome. He nearly died and ended up in a coma for a day (Novoselic claimed that, mentally, he was never the same after this).

Within weeks he was back in Seattle, crashing on his daughter's junkie nanny's girlfriend's couch and popping out occasionally to purchase speedballs and burritos. Cross quotes the girlfriend as saying, "He'd sit in my living room with the hat with the ear coverings, and read magazines. People came and went; there was always a lot of activity going on. Nobody knew he was there or recognized him." By the end of the month, Cobain was given an intervention and packed off to rehab in California. But he soon escaped the facility by scaling a six-foot wall and, improbably, found a seat on a flight back to Seattle next to Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan.

Despite beef between Nirvana and Guns N' Roses, the two bonded, finding a great deal of common ground as famous musicians from the Pacific Northwest with heroin problems. Once back at his house, Cobain reattempted suicide and this time he meant business. He injected a lethal dose of heroin and then blasted himself in the head with a shotgun, effectively killing himself twice. He was 27 years old.

Watching James Brown in action in video of his performances in the 1960s and '70s, it's difficult to imagine someone so assured and in control of himself and his band descending into drug-induced chaos. He even insisted his musicians remain drug-free, which alienated some, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, who departed for Parliament-Funkadelic where experimentation with drugs was more a qualification than a fire-able offense.

But the '80s took their toll on the "Soul Brother No. 1" as he started using PCP. He was arrested numerous times before, in 1988, he reportedly pulled a shotgun on a man for using the toilet in his office before fleeing, leading police on a chase near the border of Georgia and South Carolina. He was convicted of possession, driving under the influence, carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer and sentenced to six years in jail; released in three. He continued to have problems with the law for the last 15 years of his life, most often owing to charges of domestic violence.

Guns N' Roses rode to massive popularity as part of a wave of L.A. '80s bands that made a career of looking like degenerates. But GNR eclipsed their peers because they walked the walk down to a man. Axl Rose largely stopped doing hard drugs once the band was successful, but had enough experience with "Mr. Brownstone" to sing about it and clearly didn't dial down his propensity for rage, drinking and insanity.

Slash kept at it; he once told GQ magazine that his smack habit amounted to; "However much I could get my hands on. If I finished a batch, I'd go hunting for it. It never stopped." Entering Japan on tour and ordered by GNR's tour manager to get rid of all drugs in his possession, rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin swallowed his entire stash and ended up in a coma for 96 hours. Bassist Duff McKagan abused drugs so heavily that in the '90s his pancreas exploded resulting in third-degree burns inside his body.

Yet, the worst drug casualty of GNR was surely Steven Adler, who was kicked out of the band for being too fucked up in 1990 (Stradlin later claimed Adler's dismissal ruined the band's sound) and in the 22 years since, has basically done nothing but occasionally show up in news stories about the band, always supposedly newly sober.

DMX's problems with drug abuse and the law began immediately upon his rise to stardom in 1998, as he was frequently charged with rape, sodomy, sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment, assault, attempted aggravated assault, animal cruelty, possession of cocaine, possession of crack cocaine, possession of marijuana, weapons possession, aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, speeding, failure to signal, driving without a license, failure to notify the DMV of an address change, using indecent language, violating parole, theft, reckless driving and more over the next decade.

But in June 2004, DMX turned in his greatest performance as a criminal defendant yet when he attempted to commandeer a stranger's vehicle at New York's Kennedy Airport, claiming to be an FBI agent. Some might say this was the result of DMX's then nascent film career as an action star going to his head, but the 15 to 20 rocks of crack cocaine and an unspecified quantity of Oxycodone and Diazepam police found in his vehicle, which he'd earlier crashed through a parking-lot gate, seems a more likely culprit. Adding to his already impressive resume, the rapper was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and a controlled substance, criminal mischief, impersonation, menacing, driving under the influence and endangering the welfare of a child.

According to the Associated Press, after a court date related to the case, DMX hammed it up for the media, doing a dance down the steps of the Queens Criminal Court building. He may have calmed down since, but not all that much. A 2010 episode of Behind The Music dedicated to him was one of few in the show's history that charts an artist's descent into drug addiction but no subsequent rise; it shows a then-recent performance at a dingy nightclub in which he's barely able to hold it together. Since then, his arrest record has continued to grow.

A lot of musicians who came of age during the '60s exited the decade with serious drug problems, but few were still running wild decades later. David Crosby of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and (sometimes) Young, has proven a noteworthy exception here. In 1982 he went to prison for nine months after being charged with possession of cocaine and heroin. In 1985, while on probation for DUI, he was arrested for driving into a fence with a gun and cocaine in his car. Asked by a reporter why he was armed, he said it was his response to the murder of John Lennon by a crazed fan.

In Crosby's episode of VH1's Behind The Music, one of his band mates in Crosby, Stills and Nash complained that he once interrupted a jam session to stop his crack pipe from falling off his amp and breaking. As recently as 2004, Crosby was arrested after leaving his luggage, which apparently contained an ounce of pot and a gun, in a hotel room. The bag was searched and when Crosby returned for it he was arrested. To quote his occasional collaborator Neil Young, Crosby might want to ask himself, "Why do I keep fuckin' up?"

In fall 1975, David Bowie went into the studio in Los Angeles and made Station To Station, one of the best albums of his career. It saw him transition from playing conventional if fantastic rock and roll to recording a series of genre-bending masterpieces that set a template for '80s pop and whose influence is still being felt decades later. Pretty impressive, considering he was doing so much coke at the time he later couldn't remember recording the album at all.

According to David Buckley, the author of the book "Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story," Bowie's diet at the time consisted of cocaine, peppers and milk, and he lived in "a state of psychic terror." Interviews published in Playboy and Rolling Stone depicted Bowie surrounding himself with burning black candles and Egyptian artifacts and believing that bodies were floating past his window, witches were stealing his semen and that the Rolling Stones were sending him secret messages. He lived in fear of Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, owing to his supposed practice of witchcraft. In Station To Station's title track, Bowie yelped, "It's not the side effects of the cocaine; I'm thinking that it must be love," which was definitely the wrong diagnosis.

If Bowie wanted to clean up after this album, he made the wrong move by decamping to Berlin with Iggy Pop. Still, the trio of albums he recorded during this period—Low, Heroes and Lodger—honed his legacy. This trilogy along with Station To Station was cherry-picked to create a perfect soundtrack for Christiane F. We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, a German film released in 1981 that captured the harrowing lives of teenage junkies in West Berlin.

Courtney Love and drugs go way back; her father supposedly gave her LSD at the tender young age of five, resulting in him losing all custody of his daughter. She lost her husband, Kurt Cobain, to heroin addiction (and a shotgun blast) in April 1994 and just two months later lost Kristen Pfaff, the bassist in her band Hole, to heroin as well. Demonstrating impressive resilience, she was able to recover from all this well enough to deliver a well-received third album and an impressive performance in the 1996 movie The People vs. Larry Flynt (she played a headstrong drug addict prone to taking her clothes off – not a huge stretch). She also got enough plastic surgery to reasonably pass for a Hilton sister.

But Love went in a tailspin over the next decade. A sizeable addiction to cocaine and prescription drugs saw her frequently arrested and in and out of rehab. She seemed to hit bottom while promoting her terrible solo album America's Sweetheart, released in February 2004. The following month, she appeared on Late Show with David Letterman, leapt on the talk show host's desk and showed him her breasts, then sat down for an interview in which she was largely incoherent. The following month, pictures surfaced of her letting a random man suck on her exposed breast in public. Then, at a show at a club in New York City in May 2004, she threw her mic stand into the audience, which hit an attendee in the head. He was taken to the hospital bleeding profusely and Love was arrested, charged with reckless endangerment and third-degree assault.

Love claims to have been sober since 2007 but her life has remained somewhat troubled; in December 2009 she lost custody of her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, who even won a restraining order against her mother.

Comedian Neil Hamburger once joked, "Why did Britney Spears get so addicted to cocaine? Because Kevin Fed-Her-Lines!" This is, perhaps, unfair, but it's hard to deny that Spears becoming Mrs. Kevin Federline coincided with her sad descent into drug addiction, mental illness and a near total career flame-out.

It once seemed impossible or at least extremely unlikely. When Spears burst onto MTV's Total Request Live in fall 1998, her appeal was obvious. She may not have been possessed of Mariah Carey's pipes but—like Madonna before her—worked well with what she had. More importantly, she was mesmerizingly charismatic; a formidable presence on camera. In short, she was a product, and as such seemed unlikely to start donning trucker hats and wife-beaters and marrying every mistake in sight.

A decade later, all that and worse had happened. In January 2008, recently divorced from Federline and fresh off of publicly shaving her head and bashing a paparazzi's car with an umbrella, she became uncooperative during a routine turnover of her sons to Federline's representatives and ended up hospitalized when police were summoned and concluded she was on drugs. The following day, she lost custody of her children entirely and was committed to a psychiatric ward. A February 2008 Rolling Stone cover story on Spears' decline lamented, "Even Michael Jackson never deteriorated to the point where he was strapped to a gurney, his madness chronicled by news choppers' spotlights."

In the five years since, Spears has mounted an impressive comeback, but this has meant her father placing her finances in conservator-ship and retaining this control long after the singer began behaving herself. As for her art; her music is still fun but she's now lost in a sea of imitators. Her once assured rule over pop music has long since been abdicated to the likes of Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry.

If you listen to the ancillary tracks on the superb 2011 reissue The Smile Sessions by the Beach Boys, you'll hear Brian Wilson experimenting with drugs while in complete control of his music. He asks others in the studio if there are any more "hash joints" left and idly comments that the LSD is starting to kick in, but at the same time rules the studio musicians present with an iron fist; for example, he instructs a guitarist exactly which strings on the guitar he wants him to strum.

But holding such a firm grasp on his mind was another matter. Shattered by a lack of support from his fellow band mates in his new musical direction and driven mad trying to compete with the Beatles (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was partly a response to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which had been a response to the Beatles' Rubber Soul), Wilson shelved Smile, which would have been his masterpiece.

Subsequent years were not kind to Wilson. He got seriously addicted to cocaine, his weight ballooned and he descended into mental illness and was put under the care of a manipulative psychologist named Eugene Landy. In the early '80s, he was fired from the Beach Boys; a once unthinkable move for a band built around his songwriting talents. He's made many comebacks since, even rejoining the Beach Boys. Still, one can't help but wonder what might have been if he'd recorded all the songs he's written over the years that were only heard by those in proximity to the piano in a sandbox in his living room. For his part, however, Wilson doesn't altogether condemn drug use; speaking to a Canadian radio station in 2011, he credited marijuana with helping him write Pet Sounds and LSD with an assist on "California Girls."

It may come as a surprise to those whose awareness of Aerosmith began with its commercial hits of the late '80s and early '90s, but the band was once a sleazy rock band known for its hardcore drug use—enough to shock the likes of the Grateful Dead. In a 1990 Rolling Stone article on Aerosmith profiling its clean-and-sober comeback, Steven Tyler relayed this anecdote; "Jerry Garcia says that we were the druggiest bunch of guys the Grateful Dead ever saw. They were worried about us, so that gives you some idea of how fucked up and crazy we were."

Amusing as this might have been, it came at a cost. Sedated in the '70s, Aerosmith was still unbeatable over a six album run, but as the '80s dawned, its abilities sagged considerably. The band lost both its guitarists for a dismal album before reuniting for the half-baked Done With Mirrors. Like a lot of Aerosmith album titles, this had a double meaning; they were supposedly going clean. But they weren't actually done snorting coke off mirrors or any other surface available, and it took a stint in rehab for the entire band to get Aerosmith's commercial comeback off the ground with the ironically titled Permanent Vacation.

In the documentary The Making Of Pump, Joe Perry describes the difficulties he faced in returning to making music not high on "China White." Speaking to Rolling Stone, however, Tyler had a different perspective: "I'm still bummed that I didn't get all the pussy I could have had in the '70s. We were more interested in the finer blends of cocaine from a shipment of dates that came in on the back of some camel with the stamp of a half-moon on it and the star of Lebanon, which by the way was laced with opium. We were real connoisseurs. That was much more important to me than some girl with big tits." It's hard to imagine a more tragic commentary on potential wasted by drug addiction.

There was a time when the Rolling Stones were the premiere rock band on drugs; they couldn't even make it out of the '60s without a member dying. When Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool in 1969, he'd just been kicked out of the Stones as his drug consumption left him unable to contribute anything of musical value to the band. Some believe he was murdered, but his autopsy noted his liver and heart were enlarged by drug and alcohol abuse and his altered state likely contributed to his drowning.

The other Stones pressed on, both musically and chemically. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested and jailed in the 1960s for drug possession, and their excess continued as they became tax exiles and launched debauched arena tours in the 1970s. Richards in particular doubled down on his drug consumption; his descriptions of this period in his 2010 book Life read like an addict's fetishistic bragging.

Even drummer Charlie Watts, long the most stable member of the Stones, started using heroin in the mid 1980s. Bassist Bill Wyman was more into girls than drugs and Jones' replacement Mick Taylor entered and left the band relatively sober, but his replacement, Ron Wood, was a different story. By the time he joined the Stones he was an established rock star via his time in the Faces. In his forthcoming autobiography, Faces, lead singer Rod Stewart relays a story in which Wood showed him that he'd snorted enough cocaine to create a hole in his nasal septum.

It was one year ago, on Feb. 11, 2012, that Whitney Houston died alone in a hotel bathtub. Her cause of death was later ruled to be accidental drowning and the effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use. Her autopsy found cocaine, Benadryl, Xanax, marijuana and Flexeril in her system at the time of death.

It was a shocking but not entirely surprising development. She was once the pride of pop R&B, a gifted vocalist whose formative years were spent singing in church. But she was apparently intent on rebelling against her good girl image, which manifested itself in her marriage to Bobby Brown and experimentation with drugs. By the late '90s, her drug use began cutting into her previously reliable professionalism. In 2000, she was supposed to sing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" at the Oscars but was high at rehearsal and couldn't remember the words. She was booted from the show.

In an interview with Jane magazine that same year, she was asked to compare hanging out with a president to hanging out with a junkie. She replied, "Just the same. The president gets off on the country. The junkie gets off on a couple of hits." Speaking with Diane Sawyer in 2002, when asked if she was using hard drugs, she replied, "First of all, let's get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. OK? We don't do crack. We don't do that. Crack is wack." But in 2009, she confessed to Oprah Winfrey, "We were lacing our marijuana with base. We were buying kilos and ounces and ounces. I didn't even think about the singing part anymore."

There is a tendency among the general public to blame all this on Bobby Brown, but her former sister-in-law Monique Houston countered this in speaking with Newsweek last year. "Drugs were around her for years before she met Bobby and continued after he left," she said. "It was worse when they were together, but he didn't cause it." Closer to the truth is the theory that Houston was struggling with her self-identity. A former assistant told Newsweek, "She was trying hard to be this kind of prissy, girly-girl people wanted her to be, but she wasn't. That took its toll."