Those are good questions. Personally, I haven't needed to rely on stimulants or psychedelics to be creative in my writing. But lots of artists have relied on drugs of some kind. What's needed is a way of seeing the world from a skewed perspective. Philosophy itself has been my method of seeing beyond conventional wisdom. And those who are social outsiders, for one reason or another, are bound to see the world differently, if only out of resentment.
Then again, I did have a couple of powerful engagements with cannabis, one of which I've written about. Clearly, psychedelic drugs can break open the mind. But creativity is a two-sided process, I think. You have to see things differently, but you also have to find order in the chaos, to edit or to usefully arrange the insights you glean from the alien perspective. So you have to be drunk and sober at the same time.
