The first drugs The Beatles ever took
The Beatles had a complicated history of drug use. By and large, the band used drugs out of either necessity or harmless recreation. Initially, uppers and stimulants helped keep the band awake for their multiple sets a night in Hamburg. They famously became potheads thanks to Bob Dylan, but before that, the group largely stayed within the realm of alcohol.
In their very earliest days, however, the group learned of a drug they could procure: Benzedrine, a type of amphetamine commonly used in pharmaceuticals around the late 1950s. Benzedrine could be found in inhalers, which is how The Beatles got their hands on some during their late teenage years.
“The first drugs I ever took, I was still at art school, with the group – we all took it together – was Benzedrine from the inside of an inhaler,” Lennon later confided. “Everybody thought, ‘Wow! What’s this?’ and talked their mouths off for a night.”
George Harrison credits beat poet Royston Ellis with making the discovery. “Ellis had discovered that if you open a Vick’s inhaler you find Benzedrine in it, impregnated into the cardboard divide,” Harrison later claimed. Lennon corroborated the claim in an interview with the International Times: “The first dope, from a Benzedrine inhaler, was given to the Beatles (Lennon, Harrison, Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe) by an English cover version of Allen Ginsberg—one Royston Ellis, known as ‘beat poet’… So, give the saint his due.”
In his book Many Years From Now, which features extensive interviews with McCartney, Barry Miles claims that a later encounter with his girlfriend Jane Asher’s father brought up his old memories of Benzedrine. “Dr Asher loved to shock his family. Once, when Paul had a bad cold, Dr Asher wrote him a prescription for a nasal inhaler and showed him how to use it. ‘You take off the top and place it on your little finger, like so.’ He demonstrated. ‘Then you take a sniff with each nostril as per normal; then, after you’ve finished with it, you can unscrew the bottom and eat the Benzedrine.’
“Peter [Asher] shuffled his feet nervously, and Paul grinned, not knowing how much he could confide in the good doctor. Paul: ‘We learned about that stuff up in Liverpool but hearing it coming from him was quite strange.'”
Cannabis, LSD, and even heroin would all have to wait: the first Beatles high came courtesy of amphetamines.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.