When I attended graduate school for writing in the midwestern USA in the mid and late 1990s, all the best classes and writing workshops were held in bars, pubs, and-or saloons. A slight exaggeration, but only slightly. It was the tail end of an era when drinking and writing, at least in the USA, were still seen by many as activities that go hand in hand. And hand in hand with drinking goes smoking, so most of the drinking writers in the writing workshops were also smokers too, either heavy, medium, or light. The second-hand smoke that was consumed along with the first-hand smoke along with the beers along with the shots of whisky while writing was being discussed in the writing workshops that were happening in the bars, makes me not wonder why I already have Stage One Emphysema nor why I’ve already had a stroke. I’m healthy as a horse otherwise (yes this is possible) and I’ve already done what you need to do to slow emphysema down which is quit smoking. I stopped drinking twenty-one years ago and there is no doubt that I would be dead now if I had not stopped drinking. Three of my writing teachers from those days are dead from drinking and smoking even though, if alive, they would not yet be 80 years old. All three of them died from some combination of chain-smoking cigarettes and alcoholism, the functional, working variety of it, that is. These men never stopped working. But they also never stopped drinking or smoking. And it put them in an early grave, just as it promises to do for almost everyone who goes too far with any of these activities. My fellow students in the writing programs were also alcoholics. One of them I almost married, except that she turned out to be an even bigger alcoholic than I was. It’s sad to see a brilliant brain slowly bludgeon itself into submission right in front of your eyes when you yourself have already done the necessary work that is required to save yourself from a similar fate. Keith Richards quit heroin in the 1970s before it killed him and his girlfriend refused to do so which is why he had to tell her sayonara, beautiful lady.
The question of why so many writers are alcoholics or heavy drinkers or alcoholics who fool themselves into thinking they are only heavy drinkers is hard to answer. Hemingway claimed that he drank at the end of the day because he needed a way to save himself and turn his writing brain off. He made this statement at a time when drinking had completely destroyed his ability to write anything decent at all. He shot himself in the head when things got too bad and it’s very, very, very unlikely that things would have gotten that bad at such a young age if he wasn’t consuming a fifth of hard liquor per day and sometimes more. Hunter S. Thompson was also a hard-core alcoholic right up until the end. Charles Bukowski, surprisingly, spent the last thirty or so years of his life tapering off drinking and drinking less and less, not more and more, every day of his life as he got older. And he did not beat himself up about it if he fell off the wagon every now and then (as long as he climbed back onto it again, which he always did). He knew that he’d never make the age of seventy if he didn’t at least cut back, cut way, way back, on his drinking.
There is a reason why almost everyone at Alcoholics Anonymous is always chugging down black coffee and chain-smoking when such is possible. The reason is that the very, very best way to quit something which is killing you is to replace it with something else that will not kill you quite as fast.
Bukowski gave up hard liquor, and limited himself to only beer or wine. F. Scott Fitzgerald tried the same trick and ended up consuming forty, yes, FORTY, twelve-ounce bottles of beer per day instead. But Buk knew that you can’t take it to that level if you want it to do any good. He limited himself to beer or wine, and he limited the amount of beer and wine he consumed, too. He also, quite early, switched to a brand of Indian cigarette which does not contain nicotine, and he stopped inhaling. When you watch the film of Bette Davis or Pablo Picasso smoking, you can clearly see that they are not inhaling just exactly like they claimed not to be, which is probably one huge reason why they were both able to chain-smoke cigarettes on a daily basis and live fairly long lives at the same time. The reason why they didn’t get tongue cancer instead is not known but not drawing the stuff down into your lungs has got to be better, overall, then nailing both your tongue and your heart-and-lungs at the same time, over and over and over again.
The point is that cutting down or reducing your intake, if such is possible, is, for some of us, another strategy that can be used for all those writers out there who are still dealing with Demon Rum and/or a drug problem of any kind.
If your problem is smoking too much marijuana, switch to edibles and gradually go to microdoses. If your problem is taking too many pills, cut your consumption in half at first. If your problem is hard liquor, stick to beer only, no matter what, and supplement with sugary foods if necessary. If your problem is LSD, use mushrooms. If your issue is too much coffee, like Balzac who sometimes drank fifty cups a day (and it killed him at 51, along with other reasons), switch to tea, or do half decaf, half regular. If your problem is cocaine, I recommend you switch to coffee, endless amounts of quadruple-strength, piping hot, totally black coffee, at least for a while. Hold on tight and wash it down with Coca-Cola if you need to. Then you can cut back on that, too (by mixing it with decaf) when the time is right. None of this is easy to do (at all), and all of it is easier said than done, but life itself is not easy to do, and anything worth doing is almost universally easier said, than done.
TAPERING is essential, depending on how badly you’re addicted. “Tapering” = gradually reducing your consumption, as opposed to going cold turkey, which means suddenly stopping any-and-all consumption of the offending substance. You cannot go from taking twenty benzodiazepine pills per day down to zero overnight, because this will give you a brain seizure, and quite possibly a lethal one. Instead, you need to methodically take less, and less, and less on a daily basis until you are down to taking only a few per day. Then you can think about quitting all of them. Same with alcohol. Do not go from fifteen beers a day down to zero overnight. Take a month and give yourself the time to adjust. On the first night, drink fourteen beers instead of your usual fifteen (you can do it). By the end of the month, you should be consuming two or three beers per night, spaced out, with food. Then you can think of saying goodbye to it all for good. It took me TWO YEARS of wearing hard-core nicotine patches and chewing nicotine gum simultaneously all day long in order to get over my cigarette addiction. The constant buzz from mainlining the nicotine in that way was almost worth giving up the smoking. All of the above is called “HARM REDUCTION” in modern medical parlance. The days of saying that you need to go cold turkey immediately or you should consider yourself a complete failure are over. Tapering and harm reduction are the way to go, and they are, for almost all of us, almost every time, the only way to go.
Cold turkey almost never works. Not long term. Among other things, it is too often based upon an impulsive decision when the subject suddenly hits bottom and has a “revelation” that a time has come for a change. Real change, real, true, deep, lasting change, only occurs with a much more thought-out and deliberate decision than that. YOU NEED TO HAVE A PLAN. You need to plan it out as methodically, strictly, and unwaveringly as you would plan your escape from a prison, if you were in prison and were planning to escape.
A long life is not necessarily the point. But quality of life is the point and should be the point for everyone, with few or no exceptions I can think of.
If the bottle or the needle or the pill are damaging your personality beyond all repair; if one or all of these or other substances are ruining the life you have left and you know it; if a lifetime of low-level, working alcoholism has rewired your brain chemistry so that you’re always half depressed and entirely negative most of the time (not to mention being a pain in the ass to everyone around you even if the only one around you is yourself, on purpose), perhaps the time has come for you to man up (no matter what your gender is) and switch activities. Just make sure to not get addicted to the new substance – or you may have to do it all over again; which would also not be the end of the world (unless you take too much).
INDISPENSABLE ADDENDUM: These days, as in all days, people get addicted to many things. The Smart Phone, Shopping, Food, Television Shows, Computer Games, Politics, and/or Sex (in one form or another, including pornography) are perhaps the biggest current offenders, besides drugs and alcohol. The tapering and harm reduction advice offered above is centered on the drug and alcohol use of creative individuals; but this advice can be transferred to any individual with any kind of addiction.
I can also add that it is ridiculous for people who are addicted to such items as Shopping, Food, Politics, or their Phone to throw stones at folks who are addicted (or have been addicted) to such items as cocaine, alcohol, or marijuana, etcetera. You may think you’re being respectable by being addicted to such “respectable” items instead of good old drugs or alc’ – but the rest of us are on to you.
Image: colourful leaves, seeds and dried petals in pink, gold and brown from Pixabay.com
literally stories 
Hello Dale
You speak truthfully and with a kind heart. I do all the rancid things you have mentioned and I do not recommend my lifestyle, but I do not repudiate it either. I went to a 12 step meeting once– by “force”–Everyone seemed so fucking unhappy and boring that I did not want to be anything like them.
It is a decision that a person must make alone–not for the kids or the job. And I respect the hell out of you for finding a third way to live. For me to live any other way is impossible. But the one thing I would tell smokers and addicts in general is this: Do what you do, but when the bad shit starts happening in your life and to your body, do not bitch about it to me. It is a consequence of choice not a damnation inflicted on you by an outer agent. Ain’t nothing more tiresome than a whiner.
I encourage everyone who reads Dale to check out the Drifter on Saragun Springs today. And I wish a Happy Mother’s Day to all, dead and alive, high, sober or just mildly toasted.
Leila
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Dearest Leila
You are one of the most productive, and dedicated, writers and editors at work in the USA today, which tells me that you have both super-abundant natural talent and willpower that would (or should) make most of us hang our heads in comparison. I have known many, many writers (literally thousands if one counts all my student writers over twenty years of teaching) and have followed many, many more over many decades, both dead and living writers. It is literally no exaggeration to say that you are one of the most dedicated and productive writers working in the USA today. The honest truth is that I do worry about your health sometimes but it has zero to do with your habits and all to do with wanting you to be around forever because you are so cool, so great, and so one-of-a-kind! Call it selfish worry. But whenever it pops up I remind myself of the Tao. For me worrying itself is a sin, NOT what someone else chooses to do to their body. But I do admit to a fatherly concern when it comes to you. AND I am also an occultist, which I have been for fifteen years. I can’t say for sure from such distance of course but my guess is you are one of the healthiest persons on the Planet – because of your spirit. The spirit affects the body in ways we don’t even know about yet. (By “we” I mean traditional medicine.) My German grandmother remained a heavy drinker and sometimes a super heavy drinker until her dying day at the tender young age of 94 and her mind at that time was as alive as it had been when she was 4 or 24. She even got angry at me sometimes for no longer drinking even though it was her who talked me into quitting in the first place.
Lest this article give the impression that I am some sort of hectoring preacher when it comes to this topic, I want to add that I am a regular consumer of edible marijuana, magic mushrooms, strong black coffee, extremely strong green tea, Gabapentin, and occasionally a few other substances as well, when I can find ’em. Substances I’ve been addicted to in the past and have gotten over include: alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, opioids, benzodiazepines, and the smoking form of marijuana. The only one I really still miss is smoking marijuana, which I used to do in such vast quantities that being around me was like wandering around in a Jamaican village. I even traveled to Jamaica so I could be around people like me. Weed is everywhere in the USA today (even in the states where it ain’t legal) but we still can’t keep up with Jamaica. But one can still hear me blasting Bob Marley’s music while being on edibles on a regular basis.
This article wishes to DESTROY the topic of drugs as a taboo topic. It wishes to make this an “out” topic that can be talked about as if drug use and abuse were as normal as anything else, which they are.
Thanks for mentioning me on the Springs today, Leila! And thanks to Mr. Salvador Dali, who helped inspire the Drifter’s column today on the Springs.
Dale
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Sage advice delivered in an entertaining and informative way. I knew about those writers’ addictions in general, but the details drive the point home.
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Thank you, David
Your poet, William Wantling, of Normal, Illinois, USA, can write about these subjects much better than I can.
I urge Readers to seek out some of his work, such as:
“The Awakening;” “Heroin Haikus;” “Great American Novel for chas bukowski;” etc…
At his best, Wantling is as good as his friend Bukowski…Had he lived past 40 he might’ve outdone Buk in many another way as well…
Dale
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Wow, sounds like the writer has done the best he could under the circumstances. Black coffee, now I agree with that. There’s even a song about that one. Well, there’s lots of songs about addictions generally, to tell you the truth. Writers, artists, musicians, they can get hooked. “Heroin,” and “Cocaine” for example have songs all their own. “White Line Fever,” and “Everybody Must Get Stoned.” The worst substances to abuse are crystal meth and fentanyl and wow how can you taper with those? Too much! But yes I agree with the tapering, that’s how most of my friends managed to reduce or quit. A number of them were self-medicating…..or had been prescribed pain killers, then got hooked. Percocets and oxycontin, wow, those were/are also challenging. I’m truly lucky to have never been addicted, maybe to the phone, sure, but this is child’s play compared to some of the heavy hitters. Yeah, it was considered cool to smoke at one time, now it’s the pariah of all addictions. I started out with mattress stuffing, maybe that’s why I quit so fast.
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Hi Harrison
Thanks as always for thoughtful and energetic commentary!
I would never have believed this myself until I saw it happen, but it is possible to taper on crystal meth too if you’re careful; I only know because I’ve seen my cousin do it. She also used to keep this drug on her nightstand and would “sip” at it throughout the day like coffee; she says she doesn’t like the taste of coffee. Utter madness I know, and certainly playing with fire, but she has always been (to say the very least) an unusual person.
My 19-year-old twins had a best friend who died from fentanyl. Everyone knew he was doing it and they all tried to talk him out of it to no avail, and then the end came. They both have a picture of him on their wall/s.
Thanks again, and here’s to strong black coffee (in relative moderation)!
Dale
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Hi Dale,
This has resonated and I thought that I would let you see my scribblings as I read this. Sorry there is no coherent explanation
-In Scotland, drinking was (Hopefully not now) a passage. The proudest (??) moment as a young teen was when you could tan a bottle of booze. (Real booze 40% plus) and not be sick. Being sick was a disqualification.
-I took my first reaction to smoking and kept it. I hated it and didn’t do it. I loved the taste of many a booze and am still living with that.
-Not sure if I agree with you why folks die – I reckon we all have a date. Circumstance can be used. (HAH!! A bit off the wall but seek out ‘The Library Of The Dead’ by Glen Cooper!! Really entertaining!!)
-When I was a kid, I drank for the taste (I swear!!! Only for the taste!!) Now that I know(??) better, I still drink for the taste and the numbness.
-I love your replacement line. Robert Downey Junior done Martial Arts.
Best line ever from him was ‘I’m allergic to alcohol, it brings me out in handcuffs.’
-An auld skit from the master Rikki Fulton, ‘Look at the state of you!! I thought you were on low alcohol beers,’
‘I am. I’ve had a hundred and forty six.’
-My Great Aunty Nan never inhaled until I got her some Weed. Her arthritic knee disappeared
-I would love to read your take on another addiction that destroys everyone around them, (Yep, I know that we could argue that they all do) that isn’t mentioned – Gambling. (It ain’t caught me…I’m such an unlucky bastard I wouldn’t partake!! But I knew one of the nicest guys in the world who had to keep moving due to this.
-Cold Turkey – That’s why Alice Cooper believes in god. His doctor told him he shouldn’t have done this as it should have killed him. Between that and a couple of car crashes, he believes that someone was looking after him.
-I agree. Addiction these days is weird. I’m not sure I can say anything without insulting!!!!
Dale, this is brilliant. It’s thought provoking, perceptive and more importantly – REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugh
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Hi Hugh
When I was twelve years old in Detroit, Michigan, USA, my grandfather handed me a can of beer and shot of whiskey and said I was old enough to “be a man” now. Within a couple of years, I was regularly imbibing with him and his friends on a regular basis, mostly on the weekends and holidays, which is when they did most of their drinking. Ah, the good old days! Drinking, and holding your liquor, were considered “manly” back then. Drinking and losing it and making a fool of yourself by throwing up and so forth, were considered unmanly, weak, lame, pathetic. It sounds like Scotland and the USA have a lot in common, which does not surprise since Scotland has also influenced so much of our music and poetry over here as well! (And our politics.)
I’m glad this piece feels REAL, that is exactly what I am after so thanks for letting me know!
Dale
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Very interestingly written. There’s always been this Dionysiac idea of the creative person who is fuelled by excess, extreme in their compulsions. It goes with the idea of artistic genius. Sometimes it may well be the case. I guess there must be as many or more artists who live balanced, less overtly colorful lives – but they tend not to garner as much attention or be the subject of biopics.
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Thank you for your astute and intelligent commentary and I agree with you!
I think the good writer, of whatever kind or genre, needs to create a PERSONA who creates the work, and he/she or they needs to make it INTERESTING. Drugs and alc’ ain’t necessary, but there has to be some kind of edge there; something really interesting; whether the writer is well-balanced or not behind the scenes is not what matters in the end, IF that writer is willing to do it all for the art, nothing but the art. That kind of behavior in itself is what’s interesting, truly interesting, I think. Like when they asked Salvador Dali if he did drugs and he said: “I AM DRUGS!” Thanks again for a truly interesting and thought-provoking answer to this essay!
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As one who is now sober as the judged, I can only marvel at the unpreachy wisdom of this. And as one who did the whole cold turkey thing – from heroin, methadone, benzos, amphetamine, alcohol etc – I somehow also agree that it’s the least wise route. Brilliant writing, as always, Dale.
Geraint
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Geraint
I am not surprised that you went through all that; and I am damn glad you made it through. God bless, even if it doesn’t exist!
I am not surprised because your work displays a rare and true brilliance, and brilliant people often go through things like these.
Making it through everything you mentioned takes a near-superhuman strength, and I mean that LITERALLY.
Thanks again as always!
Dale
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Hi Dale
Great rundown on addictions. It really drew me in, as a recovering alcoholic. It took me back to my experiments with reduction.
Whatever works to get you on the right or righter, healthier track.
People do like to judge alcoholics, and drug addicts from some higher ground that is probably built on sand. I like how you point out that they surely have addictions, too.
The “piping hot coffee” struck me as a funny detail. So bold that it wakes up the reader.
I remember being at AA downing coffee. Always with a drink in my hand–that doesn’t go away even in sobriety. Nor for a long time—if ever.
Glad you pointed out that people don’t have to carry all this damn shame for relapsing. Not that I recommend it.
Escaping from prison is right. Being locked up in addiction is a sad state.
“you’re always half depressed and entirely negative most of the time”
Excellent definition of how alcohol can rewire your brain into a negative and depressed person. I think a lot of addicts will say, “Oh shit that was me.”
Great stuff, dude!
Christopher
PS: Enjoyed the descriptions of writers, drinking and smoking non-stop in the bars–and the columnist you met for two minutes. I thought that was an excellent example of world building and setting a scene. Very vivid!
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CJA
You made the decision to save yourself, and the Self is the only one who can save the addict. American Literature is the richer for it, and that’s no joke. Leila and I both think you’re a better writer than Stephen King, who we both respect!! Thanks for your sobriety and your friendship! Tell the Light Bringer I said hi as always! (Sorry Steve but it happens to be true!)
DWB
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Hi DWB
Just being mentioned in the same conversation with Steve makes my pulse rise!
Thank you too for the same! I will let her know.
CJA
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