Sherlock Holmes and Drug Addiction

If there was one thing to be said about Sherlock Holmes, it was that he was an intelligent man. And that was exactly the point: he was a man. As a man, he was not capable of knowing everything at every second, and as a man, he had a weakness.

This weakness in particular though was one that had haunted him for the majority of his life: the urge to be self-destructive combined with an intense hunger for new knowledge. The adage ‘curiosity killed the cat’ would suffice excellently in Mr. Holmes’ case, speaking to the fragile nature of the trait; one can put it to use productively and make discoveries, or one can take the more dangerous and life-threatening path where curiosity contorts and twists into something that drives one forward into madness.

Freud called it a death wish, an inherent drive of human beings to destroy oneself in any way possible.

Sherlock was certainly well acquainted with this theory, having acted upon it multiple times in his life. He had come close to death on numerous occasions, the first being when he was only twelve and curious as to whether or not a shot to the chest would kill him, when the other children repeatedly told him he was heartless. His only saving grace that day was his older brother Mycroft, who discovered him before the morbid experiment could be completed. Since that day, Mycroft had remained in a constant state of vigilance over the younger Holmes, worried he would try something similar again.

Though there were hiccups along the way, the next major incident cropped up in secondary school, when Sherlock began to get involved with addictions of all sorts, though drugs made their way to the top of the list. He found this to be a much more convenient way of indulging himself, and much less risky than self-experimentation. 

Although Mycroft had him put through one rehabilitation program after another, he almost always regressed.

It wasn’t until he was offered the opportunity to assist the Scotland Yard and put his brilliant mind to work that the vicious cycle finally came to an end. With an outlet for his energy and intelligence, Sherlock found solace among the cadavers and blood splatter of crime scenes. It gave him peace of mind, for once, to have a purpose. Unfortunately though, this period of relaxation was brief.

Among the praise and attention he received for his skills in deduction, he found too an abundance of insults and doubt. Some of the members of the staff would call him alien, strange, broken, wrong, freak. It wasn’t long before the drugs were picked back up in the lulls between cases to block out this negativity.

But did that not prove them all wrong then? Thanks to the addiction, he was more human than most of them. The way he was enraptured by his fix, the dominance it held over him, that was what changed him from a God to a man. He tried to destroy that which made him great, killing off the cells in his lungs, his liver, and his brain. The pull of his desires matched the long, slow drag of the cigarette, the sharp clarity of his focus matching the prick of the needle. Sherlock worshiped the Gods of nicotine and cocaine, and this glorification of lethal substances made him human, gave him that necessary flaw and brought him back down to par with the rest of the world.

-Paige, alumni