How Keith Richards is still alive has been bothering modern medicine for a long time; potentially the most excessive man in rock music, he has taken more drugs and mind-bending substances than any human should be able to survive, yet he's still alive and even more surprisingly, still rocking with The Rolling Stones. The man is a medical marvel. In 2007, following his recovery from a fall which put him in hospital and delayed a 'Stones tour, Richards was asked in an interview what the strangest thing he ever snorted was. No one expected him to say the recently cremated remains of his father. So the story goes, he ground up a little bit of the ash and mixed it with some cocaine and snorted it. Naturally the story then made headlines in tabloids around the world and raised Richards' notoriety exponentially. The band's PR people came out and said that the anecdote was a joke but Richards hasn't said anything to contrary about it and given his reputation for smoking, snorting and injecting almost anything and everything, it's entirely believable that the story is true. Richards himself said in the interview "My dad wouldn't have cared. It went down pretty well and I'm still alive".