[Drew]

Originally Posted by Metal Ken

Sometimes people just do it for the hell of it.

This is pretty much spot on.

I look at drugs the same way I look at any other lifestyle choice. The way I see it, it's not really my business which choices other people make, provided their choices don't effect me. If someone in a band I like happens to like the occasional line of coke before he hits stage, more power to him. If a buddy of mine does, whatever. It's just when, like any lifestyle choice, it begins to have a destructive impact of a friend of mine that I feel it's my place to get involved. This is just as true of a friend with a burgeoning drug problem as it is a friend who won't go out on nights The West Wing, even a West Wing rerun, is on TV. In either case, intervention is in order for the guy's own good.

Sure I'm making a flippant argument here as I've never actually heard anyone dying from too many West Wing reruns, but you get the point - what people want to do is their business and it's only your place to judge them when it begins to impact others in their life. "Drugs are bad, m'kay?" is an incredibly two-dimensional picture of what's a very three (and arguably four) dimensional situation.

Myself, I don't know if I can think of a single person, myself included, who hasn't at one point in their life used a "drug" in some sense of the word recreationally. I don't see that as a problem, or even necessarily a bad thing. It's when your own actions begin to influence others that it's a problem and that it becomes my business.

And the myth that drugs are good for musicians can't be completely discounted - Parker was done in by heroin, but in the process completely changed the face of modern jazz. Is that a fair tradeoff? And while this is highly debatable, I personally feel that there were only moments when a sober SRV could touch the early work of a drunk-and-coked-up SRV. How much of that was the influence of fame, and how much of that was sobriety? I have no idea. I'm not advocating becoming a cokehead if you want to play blues, but I also won't categorically state that there wasn't some sort of connection there, because I think the picture is far too complex.