Well.....duh....
This review of "The Road of Excess" in the New Yorker caught my eye with its mention of Thomas De Quincey’s "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," a book that I never read but was always running across during my employment in my college library. (Why would a small Catholic women’s college possess about 500 copies of this book? I will never know.......)

This article is a nice distillation of a lot that I learned the hard way. The reviewer quotes W. H. Auden on the writer’s use of drugs as a "labor-saving device" in the "mental kitchen," with the important proviso that "these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down." I wasn’t a big member of the let’s-get-high-and-watch-Sesame-Street crowd, but I did have my misguided times of amphetmine use to maximize my potential. Which it didn’t. But it took me a long time to figure it out. This rang a bell: Sartre is probably a bad advertisement for the effect of amphetamines as an aid to composition
...........therefore a recognizable type of speed freak, the type dedicated to obsessive, unfinishable, and, to the neutral observer, pointless toil—the sort who, several hours after taking the drug, can usually be found sitting on the floor, grinding his teeth and alphabetizing his CDs by the name of the sound engineer. Ouch.

I’m glad that’s behind me. And I’m not too smug when I read about crystal-meth addicted housewives and moms who dip into the kids’ Ritalin. That’s a trap I can sympathize with and I really don’t want to go there. (Although I would have to get high to watch Sesame Street.....some things just can’t be tolerated with chemical assistance.)