Famous Historical Drug Users and Addicts

Famous Figures Who Also Used Drugs

Long before it became a rock n' roll cliché, drug use was extremely common throughout the globe for centuries. Here are just a handful of famous drug users, some of which might come as a surprise.

11 Famous Historical Figures Who Were Also Drug Users

1. Robert Clive (Clive of India): Opium
2. Horatio Nelson: Opium
3. William Wilberforce: Opium
4. Frédéric Chopin: Opium
5. Charles Dickens: Opium
6. Sigmund Freud: Cocaine
7. Tsar Nicholas II: Opium, Cocaine, and Morphine
8. Winston Churchill: Barbiturates
9. Hermann Goering: Morphine and Cocaine
10. Anthony Eden: Amphetamines and Barbiturates
11. Leonid Brezhnev: Barbiturates

1. Robert Clive (Clive of India) (1725–1774): Opium

Robert Clive was in and out of trouble in his youth, even running a protection racket with his gang of teenage delinquents in his native Market Drayton, Shropshire, England, which was probably good training for an imperial pioneer. Eventually, his despairing father got him a job with the British East India Company and sent him abroad to sort him out.

Suffering from depression, he attempted suicide and failed, which probably made him even more miserable.

As Britain and France fought for control of the sub-continent trade, however, Clive became a soldier and gained a reputation as a formidable and fearless fighter. After the Black Hole of Calcutta incident, Clive was given command of the relieving army and won key battles which allowed the British to establish their empire in India.

Suffering severe abdominal pains, Clive became addicted to opium, which wouldn't have helped his mood swings. Becoming fabulously rich did nothing to ease what we would now call bipolar disorder, and Clive succeeded in killing himself in 1774. His pet tortoise outlived him by 232 years, dying in Calcutta Zoological Gardens in 2006.

2. Horatio Nelson (1758–1805): Opium

Let's face it, a man who lost an eye and an arm in the line of duty must have known a thing or two about pain, so it's hardly surprising that Britain's greatest naval hero became dependent on opiates.

Horatio Nelson was a mess health-wise. He was famously seasick at the beginning of every voyage and suffered from a whole range of afflictions, such as scurvy, yellow fever, malaria, heatstroke, and depression over the course of his career. No wonder he needed cheering up a bit.

Nelson gave us the expression "to turn a blind eye" after famously, and probably apocryphally, ignoring the signal not to attack at the Battle of Copenhagen by putting his telescope to his damaged (though not fully blind) eye and claiming he couldn't see it. He lost most of the sight in his right eye due to a shell explosion, though he never wore an eye patch despite the popular image of him with one.

In 1797, in Tenerife, he was hit by a musket ball, which shattered his right arm. Amputation was not a clean, painless operation in those days, and Nelson was left to recover with brandy and an opium pill—supposedly back on duty and giving orders half an hour later, but with the beginning of a habit, he would take to the grave.

3. William Wilberforce (1759–1833): Opium

Despite having gone down in history as the leader of the Abolitionist movement against the transatlantic slave trade, Wilberforce was not the politically correct liberal that he was made out to be. Despite campaigning for the end of the trade, he was not at all keen to see an end to slavery itself, believing that those already in bondage were unfit for anything else.

At Easter 1786, Wilberforce became a born-again Christian, giving up alcohol in the process. Like women's suffrage, gay rights, and other historically unpopular causes that eventually get accepted and (mostly) taken for granted in the end, Wilberforce's radical and extreme ideas regarding the abolishing of the slave trade were met with ridicule and derision at first—and his ideas were blocked at every step during the 1790s and early 19th century.

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Suffering from ill health for most of his life and no doubt needing a bit of cheering up, he was prescribed the new "wonder drug", opium, and soon developed a habit. Although too ill to lead the final charge, Wilberforce lived to see gradual change, dying three days after the final passage of the emancipation bill had been accepted.

Several establishments are named after him, including a barrister's chambers in Lincoln's Inn as well as a street in Finsbury Park, both in London.

4. Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849): Opium

The son of two musician parents and like Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, a child musical prodigy, Frédéric Chopin gave his first public concerto performance at the age of eight.

Poland's most famous composer left his country for Paris on the eve of the 1830 war with Russia, never to return. Establishing friendships with other leading musicians of the day, including Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Berlioz, he became one of the leading lights in what is known as the Romantic period, composing the "Minute Waltz", "Fantaisie Impromptu", and numerous sonatas, preludes, and other masterpieces.

Chopin became a French citizen but is claimed by patriotic Poles as their own, alongside Marie Curie, another Polish hero who took French citizenship. He even has a brand of Polish vodka named after him.

Although it's clichéd behavior in the world of rock, classical musicians and composers also had their excesses, and Chopin became dependent on opium after developing tuberculosis, which would finally kill him at the age of just 39. Ill health plagued him most of his life, even causing him to postpone his marriage to Maria Wodzinski. The relationship ended soon after.

Chopin's final performance was at the Guildhall in London at a benefit for Polish refugees.

5. Charles Dickens (1812–1870): Opium

Arguably, one of Britain's greatest novelists, Charles Dickens has blue plaques all over London. Although he wasn't the first to write about the underclass, he was probably the best, and his influence is reflected in everyday expressions such as "give someone the creeps", "slow-coach" (both from David Copperfield) and "Scrooge".

Dickens' work was serialized in publications of the time, and, as the majority of the public was illiterate, people would club together to pay someone to read his work aloud to them. As J.K. Rowling is credited for encouraging reading among children, Charles Dickens is credited for encouraging literacy itself.

Dickens burnt the midnight oil in more ways than one. Fond of unwinding with a hookah of opium at night, this was a habit he took to the grave, dying of a stroke aged only 58 in 1870. Whether this was habit-related, we can only speculate.

At the time of his death, he was writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which includes the character "Opium Sal".

6. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939): Cocaine

Sigmund Freud, who spoke eight languages while many British people can't even speak their own, is the classic image of popular psychiatry that springs to mind when the subject arises. Few people are as synonymous with their industry as Freud.

Cocaine was talked about in medical circles as a new, cure-all wonder drug. and Freud was one of its earliest advocates. He wrote a scientific paper extolling its virtues, particularly as a painkiller and antidepressant, set up medical experiments, distributed it among friends, and no doubt got himself invited to every party in Vienna.

When its side effects began to be discovered, however, he stopped advocating its use publicly, though still used it extensively for 12 years until mysteriously stopped the day after his father's funeral in 1896.

A prominent Jewish figure, Freud underestimated the threat of Nazism and only just managed to get out of Austria after the Anschluss of 1938, settling in London where he died a year later aged 83.

7. Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918): Opium, Cocaine, and Morphine

The massacre of the last of the Romanovs and his family brought Imperial Russia to an end and heralded the establishment of the Soviet Union under the Bolsheviks.

The last Tsar of Russia didn't have an easy time of it. Like many of Queen Victoria of Britain's descendants, his son Alexei was a hemophiliac, Victoria being the carrier, and he was often in agony from internal bleeding in his joints. The not-so-holy holy-man Grigori Rasputin was the only person who could relieve his pain, likely by using hypnosis, thus gaining unprecedented power at court and adding to the tsar's unpopularity.

State-sponsored antisemitic pogroms were rife across Russia, and Jews were fleeing West across Europe and to America. The war against Japan at the beginning of the century had gone badly. Crops were failing across the country, and demonstrators against the tsar and the government were being massacred in the cities.

On top of all that, the First World War wasn't going very well. The whole country was in chaos, and the tsar and his family were presumed to be living in luxury away from it all.

Nicholas suffered from a number of physical ailments brought on by stress and spent his last two years high on a cocktail of addictive and dangerous uppers and downers as well as hallucinogens. Visitors to the Winter Palace would comment on his ghost-like appearance, his apparent lack of concern towards the impending crisis, and his indifference towards the danger he and his family were in.

8. Winston Churchill (1874–1965): Barbiturates

During peacetime, Winston Churchill was almost universally hated in Britain. As home secretary, he famously sent the military against striking miners and suffragettes and tried to stir up trouble during the general strike. Some people are just born fighters.