Miles Davis’ view on drugs and how the jazz world was policed: “It enhances creativity”
“I didn’t intend to get a habit,” Miles Davis said in a 1986 interview, looking back on his introduction to heroin back in the late 1940s. The visionary jazz trumpeter was actually a bit late to the “club,” so to speak, as the smack epidemic had already decimated New York’s jazz scene by this point, with Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday among those in the throes.
“I was doing the shit because it was supposed to be fun,” Davis said. “I didn’t know it was going to be like that… It took me three years to break it.”
Miles was luckier than most. Before the age of 30, he’d managed to emerge from that dark period, ready to set his permanent mark on the jazz world. It had required a two-week stay at his father’s farm back home in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he went cold turkey, curled up in bed in a cold sweat until “my pores opened up and I smelled like chicken soup,” he later told Ebony magazine. “It takes forever to kick it. I’m still kicking it now. It lasts until it goes out of your head.”
Despite his own miserable experiences with hard drugs and his decision to stop drinking and smoking later in life, as well, Davis didn’t necessarily preach a “Just Say No” attitude. Instead, much of his dismay over what he’d seen through his long career, and the many friends he’d lost to drug addiction, boiled down to an observation of hypocrisy in how drug use was policed in America, and the general misinformation around it.
“It enhances creativity,” Davis told a reporter with the United Press International in 1986. “They say it doesn’t, but it does. You see people in movies, and they get ready to do something; they say, ‘Pour me a drink, I had a hard day,’ or ‘I need to light up a cigarette.’ Now that shit is worse than dope.”
Davis felt that things might have played out differently for some of the great musicians he’d known if society had treated them with the same respect often granted to artists who’d merely chosen alcohol and tobacco as their vices.
“Look at Billie Holiday and Bird [Parker],” Davis said. “They’d be still in it today if they could have walked up to a cop and said, ‘Yeah, I use drugs. I don’t sell it. I use it… They’re gone because of the fact they were hassled over it. When you break their [drug-taking] routine, they get cold too fast after sweating, and they have pneumonia. Every time you have pneumonia, it weakens the lungs.”
Miles was more of a professor of cool than a medical doctor, but his point is valid, nonetheless. Billie Holiday, who’d already suffered so much in her life and had gravitated to drugs to ease her pain, was essentially punished all over again for her addiction, as she was arrested for drug possession, sent to prison, and, even after serving her time, was banned for more than a decade from playing in New York’s club circuit during the prime of her career. All of these things certainly played a role in her death in 1959 at just 44.
Davis lived a much longer life, but always had issues with trust dating back to those rough years when he’d nearly lost everything. At the age of 60, in 1986, his legacy was now unimpeachable, but he still didn’t like the idea of putting himself in the same category as his own jazz heroes.
“I know what I’ve done for music,” he said. “But don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.”
