John Lennon Blamed His Beatles Bandmates for His Heroin Use
Each of The Beatles used drugs, but John Lennon surprised his bandmates when he began using heroin. He explained that he’d been dealing with painful emotions for a while, and the drug helped. Lennon said that one of the main causes of his pain were The Beatles. He believed that his bandmates and everyone involved with the group were wronging him.
John Lennon said mistreatment from The Beatles led him to use heroin
When Lennon began a relationship with Yoko Ono, he started to resent the way the rest of The Beatles treated her. He didn’t think anyone was giving her the respect she deserved. He claimed their hurt feelings from this led the couple to use heroin. This shocked his bandmates.
“The two of them were on heroin,” Paul McCartney said (per Salon), “and this was a fairly big shocker for us because we all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we’d never get quite that far out.”
“I never injected it or anything. We sniffed a little when we were in real pain,” he told Rolling Stone in 1971. “We got such a hard time from everyone, and I’ve had so much thrown at me, and at Yoko, especially at Yoko. Like Peter Brown in our office – and you can put this in – after we come in after six months he comes down and shakes my hand and doesn’t even say hello to her. That’s going on all the time. And we get into so much pain that we have to do something about it. And that’s what happened to us.”
He said they stopped using heroin, perhaps because he quit The Beatles.
“We took ‘H’ because of what the Beatles and others were doing to us,” he said. “But we got out of it.”
John Lennon wrote the song ‘Cold Turkey’ about his heroin use
Lennon and Ono stopped using heroin by quitting cold turkey, an experience about which he wrote a song. He released “Cold Turkey” with the Plastic Ono Band in 1969.
“We were very square people in a way,” Ono said, adding, “We wouldn’t kick it in a hospital because we wouldn’t let anybody know. We just went straight cold turkey. The thing is, because we never injected, I don’t think we were sort of — well, we were hooked, but I don’t think it was a great amount. Still, it was hard. Cold turkey is always hard.”
He later lamented the way people spoke about drugs
In 1980, Lennon complained about the fact that the BBC banned “Cold Turkey.” He believed they should have played it as it was anti-drug, and people seemed to have a fundamental misunderstanding of drug use.
“They’re so stupid about drugs,” he said. “They’re not looking at the cause of the drug problem: Why do people take drugs? To escape from what? Is life so terrible? Are we living in such a terrible situation that we can’t do anything without reinforcement of alcohol, tobacco? Aspirins, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, never mind the heroin and cocaine — they’re just the outer fringes of Librium and speed.”
How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
