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> Good one. Didn't Sartre do most of his work suspended between uppers and pot? Not to mention that without alcohoool, there would not have been much American lit.
Carl Sagan was a dedicated pothead, and mathematician Paul Erdős was a renowned speed freak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős himself.)[7] After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[8] Erdős won the bet, but complained during his abstinence that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit.
-- Andy