5. Ken Kesey (1935 - 2001)
Wikipedia
Drugs of Choice: LSD, cannabis Ken Kesey's inspiration for the generation-defining novel and Hollywood blockbuster One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and experimentation with LSD, came when he was working the nightshift at Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital, talking to the patients and volunteering to take the hallucinogenic drugs they were prescribed as part of a CIA-funded study. Flush from the success of the book, Kesey, then 29, decided to drive across the US with a group of his Beat Generation friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters and carried with them a jar of orange juice laced with LSD. The trip, depicted in Tom Wolfe's book
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, would come to be seen as the firing pistol for the psychedelic 1960s, and Kesey felt the trip and artistic works inspired by it would spread the gospel of freedom through LSD. He frequently held parties he called 'acid tests' involving music by The Grateful Dead, fluorescent paint, black lights, strobes, other psychedelic effects and lots and lots of LSD. The writer was arrested for possession of cannabis in 1965, and to mislead police he faked suicide by having friends dump his truck on a cliffside road containing a suicide note. He fled to Mexico in a friend's car, but when he returned to the United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in California for five months. When he was released, he moved back to his family farm in Oregon where he spent the rest of his life.