feeling like a marionette “Amphetamine abuse was particularly common among college women. It served the function of helping these women move in directions that they thought they should go but to which their actual inner feelings were opposed. Most commonly, that direction was academic success which they felt was expected by their family and their own image of themselves...

"One of them who dreamed of herself as a marionette saw amphetamines as necessary to move her strings and to keep her performing. It is interesting to note that while college women were using amphetamines to help increase their achievement levels, college men were using marijuana to help ease or withdraw from competitive pressures.” from article Psychosocial Theory of Drug Abuse - A Psychodynamic Approach, By Herbert Hendin, M.D. “Marionette” by Stephen C. Layne - from site

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Beethoven reportedly drank wine about as often as he wrote music, and was an alcoholic or at least a problem-drinker. A number of people with exceptional abilities have used drugs and alcohol as self-medication to ease the pain of that sensitivity, or as a way to enhance thinking and creativity. Sometimes they risk addiction.

Among the many artists who have used drugs, alcohol or other substances are Aldous Huxley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allen Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams. At least five U.S. writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature have been considered alcoholics. > From article: Gifted, Talented, Addicted - by Douglas Eby

For years I took pride in being resilient. But that turned into this guy who can get hit by a brickbat every morning and still look kind of cute. I mean, there's 'ready to be ready,' and then there's waking up in the morning feeling like you've been hit in the back with a sledgehammer. ...

I'm no more massive or smaller than any recovering addict. ... I am still really, gratefully, happily and, until further notice, on the mend, functioning very highly and loving it. Robert Downey Jr. [LA Times, Aug 28, 2005] > related topic :  self-limiting

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"raised to suit someone else's purposes.." Molly Parker : I play a woman named Alma Garret, she's a New Yorker. She has very recently married a very wealthy man. It is in almost all ways a marriage of convenience... Alma's a woman who has lived very much the life that she was supposed to live. She's done the things that she's supposed to do for her family, for her father, for this society in which she lives.  One of the ways that she's been able to do that is by self-medicating. So basically she's also a junkie. She's a laudanum addict. Laudanum is a tincture of opium that was prescribed very often to both men and women.  But mostly to women for headaches or hysteria -- because god forbid women became hysterical. ///

She's a fascinating woman.. who's trying to forge an identity for herself outside of the boundaries that have been assigned to her by the society that she comes from.  So part of that is, is making a choice to come to this place, where there are no rules, it's completely lawless.... So in Deadwood she is given the opportunity to discover who she really is. And who she wants to be and to choose her own identity. from HBO / Deadwood site ~ ~ ~ "Deadwood" creator David Milch explains in a documentary included in the DVD set that he considers Alma the key invented character in the series. ... He clearly sympathizes with her opium habit, an affliction that often results, he says, "when you are raised to suit someone else's purposes." > from article Old West, new women.... By Laura Miller, LA Times Apr 17 2005

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Twice, soprano Andrea Gruber insisted on elective sinus surgery just to obtain more painkillers. Once, she pretended that a flood had ruined her medication so she could get a prescription refilled. There were times when she was so stoned on Percocet that she had no memory of actually singing, a self-described "junkie" whom the Metropolitan Opera banished from its stage. Her voice will be heard in the title role of "Turandot" at the Met starting tonight. "Try being a functioning junkie at the Metropolitan Opera," Ms. Gruber, 39, said in an interview at the opera house.

"I felt like such a fraud." Often, she would time a large dose for right before a major aria or duet toward the end of a performance, trying to achieve maximum numbness when the applause came. "I felt unworthy," Ms. Gruber said. // She explained that she had been free of dependence on painkillers and tranquilizers for eight and a half years. Finally settling into the major operatic career that was predicted for her nearly two decades ago, she said the time had come for her to talk about her descent into addiction and her climb back out. "I believe it's important for people to know that there are people in all walks of life who come from hell and fight their way out," she said. > from article The Spotlight at the End of the Tunnel, By Daniel Wakin, The New York Times, Jan 3, 2005

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George Carlin Enters Rehab "I'm going into rehab because I use too much wine and Vicodin," Carlin, 67, whose latest book "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" is a current national bestseller, said in a statement. "No one told me I needed this; I recognized the problem and took the step myself." ... Carlin has acknowledged having battled cocaine addiction in the 1980s but said he quit on his own by tapering off the drug. He also has suffered three heart attacks.

Speaking of his current problem, he said: "My levels of use are nowhere near the worst you hear about these days; I could easily have continued functioning at a good level ... for awhile. "But my use would have progressed, I would have been in deeper trouble, and I didn't want to tolerate that." > Reuters Dec 28 2004 > his book: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

Shortly after that I got sober and put myself in a hospital for food-addiction, drug-addiction and alcohol-addiction.

Since then my life has changed, I've put an awful lot of work into learning to walk again, and learning to be off stage -- I didn't know how to be offstage -- I had to learn and I had to listen and I had to trust what I was being told and I trusted the process and the process worked.

I don't have to wake up in the morning in a completely irrational way, I actually do wake up in the morning and get up. 

Those days when you look back, you can't believe you actually did that. 

It's something I regretted, but on the other hand if I hadn't of done that I wouldn't be the person I am today - I wouldn't have done the work on myself that was necessary to become the maturing adult that I think I am now.

To some degree, we are all compulsive. By compulsive, I mean engaging in any recurring activity to manage our feelings, an activity that eventually ends up managing us. 

We can get compulsive in many different ways -- by overspending, overeating, overworking, overplanning, overworrying, overexercising, overdrinking, overcomputerizing, or just "overovering." 

Many of us are compulsive without even knowing it. ...

Ultimately, our core compulsion is to struggle. We live in a story in our heads that is always trying to get us to "do" life, telling us we need to make ourselves and our lives better or different from what they are.

In our endless trying, we have forgotten how to be. We have forgotten how to open to the marvelous and magical adventure of life.

We have forgotten how to trust ourselves, to trust our lives, and to live in joy. So we turn to our compulsions to numb ourselves out from all our struggles, only to find ourselves struggling with our compulsions. 

As we know too well, this cycle wreaks a lot of havoc in our lives. 

What would our lives be like if we could move beyond struggle and instead reconnect with the joy, wonder, and vitality of being truly alive? 

And how would it feel not only to heal our compulsions but also to be healed by them in return? 

By being healed I don't just mean that our compulsions would no longer overtake our lives; rather, I mean that we would again be able to experience the deep peace that comes from being comfortable in our own skins, knowing that we are okay, that life is okay, and that everything is going to be okay.

Smoking is bad for your brain

Researchers in Scotland assessed the mental abilities of 465 people who had been enrolled in an IQ test at the age of 11 in 1947. 

The volunteers were tested again between 2000 and 2002, when they were 64 years old. Roughly half of them were smokers.

"Smokers performed significantly worse in five different cognitive tests than did both former smokers and those who had never smoked," the British weekly New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.

"When social and health factors such as education, occupation and alcohol consumption were taken into account, smoking still appeared to contribute to a drop in cognitive function of just under one percent."

The study, published in full in a specialist journal, Addictive Behaviours, was led by Lawrence Whally of the University of Aberdeen.

Why smoking could affect cognitive ability is unclear. One possible reason is that, in later life, brain cells are more susceptible to damage by rogue atoms called free radicals, which could be unleashed by the chemicals in tobacco smoke. 

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"Eventually you realize that if you're using drugs or alcohol, it's just a coping mechanism and that it's not taking care of the problem."

The award was presented by 16-year-old Lindsay Lohan, Curtis' co-star in the film, Freaky Friday.///

"Alcohol has become very accessible to people my age, and that's really scary," Lohan says.

USATODAY.com 5/9/2003

> Teen Line - (310)-855-HOPE or (800)-TLC-TEEN (California only)

..more quotes on : alcohol & talent development

Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a peripatetic Bay Area medical marijuana pioneer, has written approvals for 8,000 patients. ... He churns out medical marijuana recommendations like a factory, more than a dozen on a busy day. 

And he willingly acknowledges, unlike most of his peers in cannabis consulting, that he does indeed smoke pot, mostly in the morning with his coffee.

But the doctor is no tie-dyed hippie. He was a registered Republican for years before becoming a Libertarian. He looks a good decade younger than his 71 years and dresses nattily.

The only giveaway of his specialty: an embroidered logo on his white lab coat showing the snake and staff of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, atop a marijuana leaf.Mikuriya, a psychiatrist, has studied the drug's therapeutic potential since the 1960s, when he directed marijuana research at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Marijuana is so effective and benign, Mikuriya said, that the bar for patient approvals should be far lower than for prescription drugs. Likewise, the role of cannabis consultants is not to perform exhaustive tests, he said, but to determine whether a patient's condition is chronic and could be helped by pot.

> from Taking a Leaf From 'Pot Docs' -- Since 1996, a tiny cadre of California physicians has been recommending marijuana for medicinal use. They've done so at their professional peril. - By Eric Bailey, Los Angeles Times November 6, 2004
photo : Robert Durell / LAT