Six different drugs and a “hot cup of tea”: Keith Richards’ breakfast routine in the 1970s
Drugs were a plenty in the 1970s music industry, with artists revelling in an endless supply of narcotics. Ultimately, there was always something new to try, and rarely could musicians rest knowing they had tried absolutely everything available to them. Everyone except Keith Richards, of course.
It’s unlikely that there is a drug under the sun that Richards hasn’t got stuck into, even resorting to snorting the ashes of his dead father in a maniacal pursuit of high-grade cocaine. Yet in 2026, the Rolling Stones guitarist is still standing, making him the terminator of rock and roll, completely impervious to the mental and physical toll of excessive substance abuse.
It seemed as though he adopted a relatively gun-ho approach to hedonism, waking up to clean his teeth with red wine and swap his morning coffee for a line of cocaine. But in actual fact, he was relatively regimented with his habits – well, as regimented as one could be in these circumstances.
Richards explained that he relied on a heavy dosage of prescription drugs to remedy the hard stimulants that seemed to prop up his career. He detailed, “I would take a barbiturate to wake up. A Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or a Quaalude. And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you’re feeling mellow, you’ve had a bit of breakfast and you’re ready for work.”
Work in Richards’ sense wasn’t exactly a 12-hour shift of manual labour, and so calling this preparation feels like a bit of a stretch. Instead, it veers more into the territory of tranquilising whatever debauchery from the night before, laced his veins and temporarily stripped him of his master guitarist title.
Because ultimately, the amount of drugs Richards was consuming in the heady days of the ‘70s, it was important for him to find some sort of neutralising remedy. Still to this day, he is known as perhaps one of the premier drug takers in the history of popular culture and still lives to tell tales of his breakfast remedy, with no real repercussions. But Richards has always been keen to explain why he has avoided such pitfalls.
He said, “The reason I’m here is probably that we only ever took, as much as possible, the real stuff, the top-quality stuff,” Richards continued. “Cocaine I only got into because it was pure pharmaceutical – boom. When I was introduced to dope, it was all pure, pure, pure. You didn’t have to worry about what it was cut with and go through all that street shit.”
The purity and, of course, his pharmaceutical morning routine were to thank for his hedonistic longevity. But while Mandrax and Quaalude seemed to act as the heavy-hitting cures for high-grade cocaine, I would argue that the good old British cup of tea did the heavy lifting when it came to taking the edge off and balancing out one of our true party icons.
