Never mind drugs and booze, artists do best work sober

THE idea that alcohol and drugs can stimulate artists, writers and musicians to create great works of art is a "dangerous myth" and the substances can actually stifle creativity, a leading psychiatrist has warned.

Dr Iain Smith, a consultant in addiction psychiatry at Gartnavel Royal Hospital in Glasgow, said that while many artists and writers were well known for their use of intoxicating substances, most produced their greatest works when they were sober.

"The reason this myth is so powerful is the allure of the substances, and the fact that many artists need drugs to cope with their emotions," he told the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Edinburgh.

"Artists are, in general, more emotional people and the use of substances to deal with their emotions is more likely to happen."

Dr Smith said that drugs and alcohol were social substances and many creative people, such as Ernest Hemingway and the French artist Degas, spent a lot of time in Parisian cafes exchanging ideas and consuming large quantities of absinthe and other types of alcohol.

Dr Smith said that American writers Tennessee Williams and Hemingway were both addicted to alcohol.

He said the poets Coleridge and Keats favoured opiates, as did writers Proust and Edgar Allan Poe, while Vincent van Gogh drank absinthe.

American writers F Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill and William Faulkner were all recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and all were alcoholics, while the Doors frontman Jim Morrison regularly performed while high on drink or drugs.

Dr Smith told the meeting that the American writer Hunter S Thompson once wrote: "I'd hate to advocate drugs, alcohol or insanity to anyone – but they've always worked for me." Baudelaire also urged fellow poets "to be drunk always".

But from reviewing the evidence, Dr Smith claims that many of these artists were most productive during times of sobriety.

"The idea that drugs and alcohol give artists unique insights and powerful experiences is an illusion. When you try and capture the experiences (triggered by drugs or alcohol], they are often nonsense," he said.

For example, the strong visual experiences triggered by hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD can be captured on canvas – but this is unlikely to happen in other fields such as music and writing. Dr Smith said: "These drugs often wipe your memory, so it's hard to remember how you were in that state of mind."

Dr Evelyn Gillan, chief executive of Alcohol Focus Scotland, agreed that the view that alcohol boosted creativity was a "dangerous myth".

"What we know physiologically about what alcohol does is that it dulls your senses and it brings about all these changes. It reduces your co-ordination skills, it reduces your clarity of thought.

"So obviously that is going to reduce your ability to be creatively at your best."

Dr Gillan said it was not healthy for young people in particular to associate excess consumption of substances with improved creativity.

"That is not the sort of message we want to be sending out, because it is not true apart from anything else," she said.

"It's like sport – why do we have alcohol companies sponsoring sport? You are associating a drug with something that requires peak physical fitness."

Tom Wood, drugs commentator and former drugs tsar of Edinburgh, said: "The more myths that are dispelled about drugs the better.

"Stimulants are a good example. Cocaine has got to be the drug with the best PR ever, and it is completely untrue."