Song Lyrics: Post Them

I think Ted speaks truthly about personaility types regarding creativity, and that meshes well with Scryler's take on other sources of mind alteration (specifically mental illnesses, or the physiological manifestations that go along with them - 'chemical imbalance' in the brain due to manic depressive states or psychotic breaks, etc.).

I would tend to agree that a drug habit would likely stifle productivity in particular for the reasons GA82 mentions. If your purpose in life is to get high, as is the case with drug addicts, then you won't likely do much serious 'work;' but if your purpose in life is to be creative, then being high might bring about a mental state that facilitates that creativity, through, for example, the change of perspective that WHN mentions.

I don't suppose anyone thinks "Jimmy Cracked Corn" is a particularly good song, and I'll bet the writer was completely sober and in a healthy frame of mind with his feet planted firmly on the ground when he wrote it.

Also, I don't assert (though I don't know, never been a drug user) that drug use would be particularly good for performance. Probably quite the opposite, as that requires some degree of mental and physical dexterity that is likely inhibited by drugs.

p.s. - EBYT may be about stalking, but the protagonist is at least of the ex-boyfriend variety, not just the creepy loner wanting to rape and murder a stranger or just steal her underwear.

"Since you've gone I've been lost without a trace ...
... I look around but it's you I can't replace"​

And I don't think we quite thought of stalking in the eighties the same way we do today. It seems like those types of things (and other social violations like public drunkeness or even drunk driving) were tolerated with a wag of the finger. That all changed when those mildly irritating but sort of cuddly offenders started kidnapping their targets and dismembering them, etc., or when those acts at least became more publicized.