Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

“But you get a good high with coke and you don’t get
hooked.” Mr. Swank, clearly a glass half full kind of
Narco.
Bowie certainly got hooked, and like most doing
the white line at the time, coke provided more of a
psychological balm at first. Bowie likely used
massive quantities of gak to completely remove all
traces of Ziggy Stardust and cauterize the wounds.
Even then, there were detectable particles of Ziggy
in his personality and so, Bowie surmised, his entire
psyche needed breaking down until there was
absolutely nothing left. Each bump he plugged his
nose with, fed into the nostril on the end of an
antique knife (his preferred method), was rock ’n’ roll
chemotherapy. As a former mod, Bowie’s
appreciation for the energy that speedy drugs can
afford a busy and enthusiastic artist was already in
place. The blow would, as is its way, get the better of
him eventually, but for a time, it certainly fuelled a
dizzying period of creativity and action. Bowie used
coke like a sculptor uses a chisel.
“David was actually very grounded. He was, like, a
very solid individual,” Tony Zanetta says. “He really
wasn’t a very wild person at all. He was a very
disciplined artist. Where he went astray was in his
experimentation with coke. It was like one day he
had to drink a glass of wine, and the next day he was
a terrible cocaine addict. It seemed at first that it was
an affectation, that it was part of his stardom
personality. But because of the nature of coke, you
don’t just dabble in it. I think it affected him more than