“An amateur chemist”: Keith Richards’ guide to drugology
Let’s be honest, it is a complete miracle that Keith Richards is still alive. Whatever spirit up above controls life and death must clearly be a Rolling Stones fan, as the guitarist has pushed up against the end more than his fair share of times. To some, it’s just good luck. To others, it’s proof of divine protection. To Richards himself, it all comes down to science.
However, science can’t account for everything. In his time, Richards has almost wiped himself out many times, whether it be due to being electrocuted on stage, surviving not one but two fires, and, obviously, poisoning himself over and over with drugs. It was his inclination towards illicit substances that it’s truly a triumph that he made it out alive, given the sheer amount of cocaine and heroin that man has consumed or pushed into his bloodstream in his time. But somehow, while so many others in the rock and roll world have been lost, Richards made it out – whether it’s due to luck or God.
Richards himself never really seemed to have any doubt that he would be fine. Maybe part of that was due to the addict’s mindset and how, back then, he would always put the thrill of the high over the fear he could fall. But part of it genuinely came down to his belief that he was following the right instructions and managing his drug taking wisely, following advice that far, far outdated him.
“I always went by this old 1903 medical dictionary, which was produced before such drugs were considered bad for you,” Richards said. This is a wild sentence to write, but the guitarist’s 35-year-long drug-taking career was genuinely enabled by an Edwardian-era book.
The 1960s icon could never be told that what he was doing was bad or risky, cause he was taking his medical advice from literal quacks before the birth of most modern medicine and modern medical knowledge. Germ theory was a new thing then. They’d only just stopped putting leeches on their skin to bleed a bad mood out of people, thinking it all came down to simply having too much blood. Doctors weren’t even really washing their hands, didn’t really get why they had to, and obviously, smoking was good for you. So it’s not that surprising that they were telling people, ‘Sure, go crazy on cocaine!’
That’s exactly the kind of doctor ‘60s and ‘70s era Richards especially was after. “If you were constipated, you were told to go to the chemist’s and get a little tincture of cocaine. If you had diarrhoea, then it was a grain of heroin,” he recalled of his old medical knowledge. Because, of course, he was an expert. “I’ve abused drugs, but I didn’t go into them without boning up on them first,” he told GQ.
Sure, he had no formal qualifications, but given the amount he was consuming, they should’ve given him a PHD in party fuel. “I’ve been an amateur chemist, a ‘drugologist,’” he said, declaring his own title, one he felt he deserved.
