This is Your Face On Drugs

Here’s a conversation I frequently have with myself: The effect controlled substances have on your looks. I am not condoning legal or illegal drug abuse. I’m just saying that some drugs are kinder to your complexion than others. This is my ranking of the face-friendliness of drugs, from 1 (not so bad) to 6 (yikes!).

6. Crystal Meth. For some reason (probabaly the drugs), meth heads claw at their faces until the skin is scratched raw. Meth also leaves its users whippet thin and therefore hollow cheeked and sunkened. And thirdly, if you’re high all the time and your only concern is getting more drugs, one tends to start looking a little care-worn. Basically, if you’re 20, you’ll look 40. Don’t believe me, click here.

5. Booze. Maybe it’s the lifestyle, but alcoholics are like meth heads without all the scabs–they look 20 years older than they should. They may not be as thin, and it might take 20 years before their looks self-destruct instead of five, but it’s still not very pretty. The liquor also makes one’s skin blotchy and puffy. And there’s that thing in which drunks’ teeth start to look like they’re shrinking.

4. Crack. Crackies are strange shuffling ghost people whose only goal in life is to get more crack. Thus, they tend to neglect their own appearance. Hair is unwashed. Over-sized t-shirts and stretchy pants are worn. And, because crack makes its users super paranoid, there is a lot of fighting going on which leads to a whole lot of crack addicts with busted-up noses.

Please also note that the flat-faced effect of multiple fractured cheeks and broken noses is a trait shared by drunks and meth users.

3. Cocaine. Coke addicts tend get all Type A when in the throes of their drug of choice. Their look is not unlike the over-aerobicized Madonna — dead-eyed, slightly aged and very hard-bitten.

2. Heroin. Yes, you can die by using it, but heroin seems to have a bit of preservative effect on its users’s looks. Of course, when they’re using they’re all spotty faced and have a reptilian sheen. But old junkies (male and female) have a sort of craggy handsomeness.

1. Marijauna. Not so much of a beauty ravager, but hardcore pot heads tend to look a little slovenly.