One more veteran and survival from the 1980s cocaine crazy times gives his speech on drugs. Aerosmith vocalist Steven Tyler talked to GQ about his addiction:
“Well, we would do cocaine to go up, quaaludes to come down. We would drink and then snort some coke until we thought we were straight. But that’s not true – you’re just drunk and coked out…
“You have a shot of Jack Daniel’s and you play Madison Square Garden and you get offstage and you go clubbing with Jimmy Page – come on!
“After two encores in Madison Square Garden, you don’t go and play shuffleboard. Or Yahtzee, you know? You go and rock the f*ck out. You’ve done something that you never thought you could, and you actually think that you are a super-being…
“It was more or less the thing to do, back then as well. I don’t think there were any bands that even knew what sober was.”
“[Drugs] absolutely work for a while. But then things go wrong. You become addicted, it’s something you do all the time, and suddenly it starts influencing your greatness.
“What happens with using is: It works in the beginning, but it doesn’t work in the end. It takes you down. There’s nothing but jail, insanity, or death.
“I was just an angry f*ck when I got high. And holding on to anger is like grabbing on to a hot coal with the intent of throwing it to someone else. You’re the one that gets burned.
“The experiences I had, and that learning process, was something I cherish forever. It’s like looking for Alice and chasing the rabbit down the hole. Your thinking is around everything that you witnessed in Wonderland.
“It’s not a bad thing – if you can write about it and make sense about it with music, then you’re golden. But that got taken away from me. I’d get so high that I couldn’t be creative anymore.
“But these moments, I don’t regret them. It was the greatest time. I’m just happy I survived, crawled out of the hole.”