Elvis Presley

:"Elvis" redirects here. For other persons and things named Elvis, see Elvis (disambiguation).

Consumption of drugs

Elvis abused drugs most of his life. He began using amphetamines and Benzedrine to give him a lift in the first half of the 1950s. According to Albert Goldman, they were first given to him by Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. The drugs seem to have "transformed the shy, mute, passive 'Baby Elvis' of those years into the Hillbilly Cat.' " Elvis also occasionally used marijuana and took LSD at least once. In her book, Elvis and Me, his wife Priscilla writes that Elvis used drugs heavily by 1960 and that his personality changed dramatically under the influence of powerful drugs. She saw "problems in Elvis's life, all magnified by taking prescribed drugs." http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0425091031/ref=sib_dp_srch_bod/102-8270012-5067331?v=search-inside&keywords=prescribed+drugs&go.x=13&go.y=9 He frequently took drugs to help him sleep, but he also experimented with drugs because he explored exotic Eastern religions and read Timothy Leary's Psychedelic Experience. In his Elvis biography, Peter Guralnick discusses the singer's rampant drug use and cites an eye-witness account of Elvis's abuse of drugs related by one of his friends, Cliff Gleaves. Speaking of the spring of 1967, Gleaves said,

Related Topics:
Amphetamines - Benzedrine - Albert Goldman - Dewey Phillips - Marijuana - LSD - Elvis and Me - Peter Guralnick

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:Elvis didn't care if anyone else took them or not. He was getting off on them. He loved to sit there high and wiggle in the chair, ... just sit there and watch TV. He didn't give a damn whether you did anything. (p.240)

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The singer's abuse of prescription drugs increased during the last years of his life. After the breakup of his marriage in 1973, Elvis was hopelessly drug-dependent. According to Guralnick

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:Elvis was clinically depressed for the last three or four years of his life. It's very much like writing about a person who's a heroin addict. Once you've established that this is the case, you're not going to write about every time the person shoots up - it's irrelevant. What's relevant is the fact that it exists, and how it affects the people around him and how it affects his own life. http://www.biwa.ne.jp/~presley/elnews-stereophile.htm

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Though Elvis abused barbiturates and narcotics so heavily that he destroyed himself, he on the other hand publicly denounced the use of drugs. At a meeting with Richard Nixon he even asked to have the President appoint him "Federal Agent at Large" for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the war against drugs. When Elvis died in 1977, fourteen drugs were found in his body during the autopsy, including toxic or near toxic levels of four. The use of different types of central nervous system depressants ("downers") must have had depressed his heart and lungs. http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/cyril_wecht/4.html According to Albert Goldman, Elvis spent at least $1 million per year on drugs and drug prescribing doctors. Significantly, in July 1995, the singer's personal physician, Dr. George Nichopoulous, loses his medical license for being too liberal in prescribing addictive drugs.

Related Topics:
Barbiturates - Narcotics - Richard Nixon - Autopsy

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