Jack White once said he's never tried drugs and his reasoning is genuinely insightful

Jack White is a fascinating character. His musical catalog runs the gamut from ragged punk-blues to progressive rap-funk to marimba-laden experiments. He and his record label, Third Man, successfully played the first LP in space. He and a bandmate once hid 100 vinyl copies of a single inside pieces of furniture they themselves upholstered. You might skim through that unusual résumé and think, "This guy definitely dabbles in recreational drugs, like many rock stars of his era." But in a 2014 interview with Dan Rather, White clarified that he’d never touched the stuff—and his reasoning ranged from the practical to the philosophical.

"I’ve never done drugs. I've never even smoked marijuana, actually," he told the host, who appeared dumbfounded by this information. "You’re kidding me," Rather said. "Obviously I don’t mean to be patronizing, but someone of your generation in the music business, the assumption is [that] of course you at least did marijuana." The White Stripes co-founder first pointed to the other headaches that might crop up: "I don’t know…Whenever I think about doing something, I always think about the periphery problems that are attached to it. Yeah, you could do that, but I [was always like], 'I live in Detroit. I’m gonna have to find a connection and go hang out with all those people to get that drug. It’s just gonna cloud what I’m doing."

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"It's Really Coming From Me"

From there, White recounted a conversation he once had in a coffee house with an "old artist," who gave him a "whole speech" about the relationship between drugs and creativity. "'All those Beatles records that were recorded while they were under drugs, those records don’t exist," he recalled the musician saying. "'They don’t even exist. It shouldn’t count because that wasn’t really them." And while White considered that line of thought "really funny," he did take something away from the discourse: "It does help in the sense that I always know that, whatever's coming out, if it's something really intense, it's really coming from me and not from something else."

It's interesting to consider the intersection of drugs and creativity. While many artists use certain substances as a gateway to unlocking parts of themselves, some may have the opposite feeling—that they cloud the purity of a creative task. White, it seems, has ultimately found other methods of inspiration.

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Getting in the Zone

In a 2022 Esquire profile, the songwriter talked about the endless pursuit of creating magic on tour, noting that it’s not like turning on a light switch. "I also don't do drugs," he said. "I have to find all kinds of methods to get myself excited, and warmed up, and into a zone where I'm not just Joe Schmo walking off the street onto a stage and plunking some notes down. It’s important that I get somewhere. But I always appreciate all the other people involved in trying to create it."

Plus, White often takes other roads less traveled—in June 2025, his wife gifted him his first cell phone, ending a noble half-century run. "Well y'all it's either all over for me now or just the beginning," he playfully wrote on Instagram.

  Jack White Snl GIF by Saturday Night Live  Giphy