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For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
—Nietzsche
The connection between creativity and addiction is nearly as legendary as that between creativity and madness. Many people expect creative individuals to abuse substances and are hardly surprised upon discovering that yet another famous artist has ended in a rehabilitation facility or died from a drug overdose. A recent New York Times oped piece (Mehlman, 2005), commenting on Philip Roth's remarkable late-age productivity, marveled at the fact that Roth has not yet been tied to “performance-enhancing drugs.” The implication here is that if Roth is not “juiced,” like O'Neill or Capote, how could he possibly have written four of his best novels after the age of sixty?
It is often assumed that artists live in the romantic tradition. John Cheever said that self-destruction is expected of the writer (Goodwin, 1988, p. 184). Indeed, there exists a very long list of creative individuals who are or were famous addicts. The history of this connection dates back to the nineteenth century, when opium and opium products were widely used and sometimes abused by writers and poets, specifically Baudelaire and the French Symbolist poets. Along with Balzac, Dumas, and Flaubert, Baudelaire belonged to an elite group of France's artistic community called The Hashish Club, led by novelist Pierre Jules Theophile. Although the club's members met on a monthly basis to study the drug's effect on creativity, little is known about what they actually discovered. What does remain are Baudelaire's (1859) poetic renderings on the effects of wine and hashish: