Timeline: Charting Keith Richards’ long-running drug arrests
“I’ve never had a problem with drugs, I’ve had a problem with the police.” – Keith Richards
“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort?” Keith Richards once famously mused. “My father. I snorted my father.” A pregnant pause descended on the interview, no doubt a joke was expected to be delivered. But no, “he was cremated,” Richards continued, “and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared, he didn’t give a shit. It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
This admission to NME back in 2007 has become a sort of paradigm for The Rolling Stones guitarist’s excesses. I’m not even sure you’d say that it is even decadent, it is simply debauched, a sort of nasal posthumous cannibalism. This was the hell-raising way that Richards as always perceived, it is just on this occasion he took a surrealist and yet inevitable turn, because like a toddler with a pea, anything you tell Richards not to put up his nose is whizzing up his snout in a flash.
Naturally, this manic lifestyle has resulted in a few scrapes with the police. As he once recalled: “There was a knock on our dressing-room door. Our manager shouted, ‘Keith! Ron! The Police are here!’ Oh, man, we panicked, flushed everything down the john. Then the door opened and it was Stewart Copeland and Sting.”
Aside from those comical tales of his hell-raising ways, we’ve chartered the many times that he has actually landed himself in trouble below. This is a timeline of a man who simply seems charmed amid this life of sin.
Timeline: Charting Keith Richards’ long-running drug arrests:
The first arrest
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll— it’s a line that Ian Dury etched into the history books, and also Keith Richards’ shopping list. In 1967, in the leafy upper-class county of West Sussex, police raided the apartment of the Rolling Stones guitarist and therein they uncovered personal amounts (or at least personal amounts by Richards’ sixties standards) of LSD, heroin and marijuana.
Remarkably the British police needed a prompt by the FBI and MI5 to let them know that Richards, the Keith Richards, might have excessive amounts of illicit substances stashed away in his mansion. The FBI had been tipped off by David ‘The Acid King’ Sniderman (no relation to Alana ‘The Coke Fiend’ Snitchwoman) who was actually a wily Canadian actor informing on the band.
Both Mick Jagger and Richards were convicted with Jagger sentenced to three months and Richards to a year, but after an appeal, these were later overturned. They only ended up serving three days.
The Mayor of Boston incident
As the report in the New York Times from the night in question reads: “Five members of the Rolling Stones traveling party, including Nick Jagger, the lead singer, and Keith Richard, lead guitarist, pleaded innocent last night in District Court to charges of assault on a photographer and obstructing police officers. They were released and left by automobile at about 11:30 P.M. for their scheduled concert in Boston.”
However, they didn’t just get released by any old means. Fortunately, for them, the Mayor of Boston was a fan. In order to ensure that the show in his good city still went ahead, he had Jagger and Richards released into his personal custody. “The Stones have been busted, but I have sprung them!” Mayor Kevin White proclaimed before their show in one of the finest political PR moves ever pulled.
The London drug bust
During a drug bust on his London apartment, Richards and his then-wife Anita Pallenberg were found guilty of a long list of possessions: marijuana, cannabis resin, ‘Chinese’ heroin, Mandrax tablets, burnt spoons, syringes, pipes, a loaded handgun, rifle and the 110 rounds of ammunition.
They also found Prince Jean Christien Stanislaus Klossowski hiding in the property, who the police described as “the self-claimed heir apparent to the Polish throne”.
Richards claimed that he was set-up by the police and besides, all the dodgy stuff belonged to his tenant anyway. So, once again, charges were dropped.
The Fordyce Incident
In order to get some peace, Richards and Ronnie Wood decided to grab a spot of lunch in the sleepy town of Fordyce, Arkansas. On their way back to reality, Richards was pulled over for driving his Impala like, well, like you’d imagine Keith Richards to drive an Impala.
The arresting officers detected the scent of grass in the car. They promptly searched it and found two grams of cocaine, which, conveniently, belonged to their passenger Fred Sessler. Richards later somehow passed a sobriety test but he was arrested for the possession of an illegal hunting knife. Fordyce is now famous as the only place that Richards has been provably sober.
The arrest that nearly ended The Rolling Stones
Canada had already informed on The Stones and saw the band as a threat to ‘the establishment’, quite what the Canadian establishment represents is still not yet known, but they found their pastoral ways at ends with the pouting rockers.
So, when a large quantity of heroin was found in Richards’ hotel room while he was in Toronto, he was charged with “possession of heroin for the purpose of trafficking.” He faced anything from seven years to life in prison. He was held in the country until April, before being released on medical grounds to treat his addiction.
Ultimately, his charges were dropped to merely “possession” after a blind woman provided a solid character witness by stating that he made special arrangements for her to be able to attend concerts. In the end, Richards pleaded guilty. He was granted a suspended sentence and ordered to play a benefit concert for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Seemingly, this was the moment he sobered up.
