u2wedge said:
you can google multiple articles on any of the people that I listed where they say themselves of how drugs affected their creativity.
There are certainly situations where drugs negatively impact the creative process by crippling the ability to think, however there are just as many examples where drug use has expanded the artist's mind and allowed them to create things that they never could have thought of 'sober'. Of course the long term impact is that drugs DO tend to shorten user's lives, and therefore the creative process might also be shortened, but that does not mean that the creative process is necessarily diminished by drug use.
Your blanket statement that drugs implicitly and negatively impact the creative process is blind to history.
You believe a junkie when they say that the substance to which they are addicted is really something that helps them be more creative? Would you say that knowing that all addicts find ways to rationalize their drug use regardless?
I'm neither blind to history nor ignorant of facts. For thousands of years, humans have consumed some form of drug and a few have also created art. However, to say that one is dependent on the other for great composition is a value judgment not born from a basis of fact.
Furthermore, I would say the introduction of new cultural influences and improved technology affected the creative output of latter 20th century artists much in the way Japanese patterns and photography affected visual art in the latter 19th century, and much more than any consumption of a substance.
To briefly escape the creative process can make you more creative during the times you focus to be creative, sure. However, drugs still have nothing to do with being creative, being more creative, or creating at all.
Drugs can be the metaphor to a great story, lyric, or prose, but so can taking a walk, after midnight or listening to the night train. Creative people perceive the impact of both without the need of anything more than what they imagine.
added:
the creative process to which I speak is the way artists combine ideas to arrive at original and apt composition. In visual art, this can be a very tiresome experience as the most conventional ideas are discovered, and the artist moves on to the really interesting stuff through exploration of material and mark. Musicians are trained to go through the same process but with different tools.