Top ten stoners from the arts and entertainment

At the Guardian Tim Lewis tagged his top ten stoners from the arts and entertainment. Only one novel made the list:

Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano
Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives

The New York Times once claimed that Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean poet and author who died in 2003, aged 50, was addicted to heroin. The accusation was strongly contested by his wife and his agent. Either way, his novel The Savage Detectives – typically considered his masterpiece – can be seen as a modest contribution to stoner literature. The main characters are Lima and Belano, two shambling poets in Mexico City who fund a literary magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by trafficking an expensive marijuana called Acapulco gold; they seem to partake themselves, too, especially Belano, who is an alter ego of Bolaño’s. “They weren’t writers,” one of the 50-odd narrators in The Savage Detectives notes. “Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don’t think they were poets, either. They sold drugs.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Savage Detectives appears among Sam Munson's six best stoner novels and Benjamin Obler's top ten fictional coffee scenes; it is one of Edmund White's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue