Before she found fame with Blondie, in the 1960s Debbie Harry was a waitress at Max's Kansas City and a Bunny Girl at the Playboy Club in Manhattan, giving her the opportunity to mix with artists, writers, models, rock stars, film directors and all manner of creative types. "It was all very middle-class," she recalled in a 1993 interview with Q magazine. "You were considered an asset."
As she developed friendships and connections in the city, the New Jersey-raised singer fell into Manhattan's colourful, bohemian, avant-garde art world, where the normal rules governing 'straight' society did not apply.
"Drugs was chic," Harry recalled to Q's Tom Hibbert. "Everybody in New York was fooling around with drugs. That's just what the scene was like. It wasn't like today where everybody knows what the implications are and what the results are. It was just a very small, elitist art world. Up in a loft. Look at my pictures! Aren't they neat? Yeah? OK, let's do some drugs to celebrate, then. It was just a fashionable situation. The stockbrokers weren't doing cocaine, only we were doing cocaine. It was just for freaks, and the quantities that are available now weren't available then. It was the 1960s, man.
"I was doing heroin," she revealed. "I was taking a serious addictive substance. Actually, I should say, was taking several serious addictive substances. Plural. But, you know, at that time it was part of the scene. Everything was like, Hey, man, this is the latest drug and this is the newest drug and here comes the next drug and you really ought to try this! So I tried it. Whatever it was."
Post-fame, Harry's drug taking became less care-free and innocent, as she and her partner, Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, lost everything in the early 1980s and developed serious heroin addictions.
"I think at that point it was a necessary evil," the singer recalled in a 2019 interview with The Guardian. "To some degree, it was self-medicating. It was a rough, depressing time of life and it seemed to suit the purpose, but then it outlived its benefits."
Those days are long in the past. In a new interview with The Times, Harry says her only chemical intake as she approaches her 80th birthday is H2O, water.
"I’m pretty clean," she tells The Times. "But I have a dirty mind."
