YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND? –

March 2, 2021 – People who walk through the glittery door of showbiz almost always go down the slippery slope of drug addiction coupled with alcoholism. To cope up with the demands of a brutal public life, artists have fallen back on drugs time and again to make themselves feel “normal”. For a commoner who looks up to these larger-than-life figures and their glamorous lifestyles, the idea of popularity being overbearing might be a little hard to grasp. But in truth, the very act of maintaining this God-like stature can make one extremely wretched. Moreover, excessive visibility exposes the artists’ vulnerable selves, making them victims of unfiltered and unwanted criticisms from thousands of unknown people. It’s almost like they wait eagerly for one slip up so that they can hurl chunks of opinions, causing the receiver injury.

John Lennon was similarly pulled into the dark hole of drug dependency. Although the period of the cultural revolution, spanning from the 1960s to early 1970s, saw the increased use of hallucinogenic drugs, often for creative purposes, Lennon’s relationship with it transgressed the artistic boundaries. The Beatles’ fixation on weed was not unknown, but it was mostly an innocent habit, an endorsement of the cultural wave: “The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were all into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time,” said Lennon.

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