Roseanne Barr (b. November 3, 1952)
The gutsiest and most populist comedienne ever, Roseanne Barr has followed her television and film successes with a writing career. Her latest book, Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm contains more homespun humor from a woman whose rocky road of fame has matured her voice. In it, she explains that her sincere and failed attempt to sing the National Anthem was fueled by psychiatric drugs and a lack of "a natural substance called THC":
Shortly after the National Anthem horror, I started to feel as though I were waking up from a bad nightmare. The Prozac, Zoloft, Klonopin, and several other mood-altering drugs that had been prescribed for me by psychiatrists (whose destruction by Scientology I now welcome) for my "Multiple-Personality Bipolar Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder" were no longer doing the trick of shielding me from reality. I became even more depressed than normal, like a lot of people do after they take antidepressants.
I had stopped smoking the Herb of the Goddess that had forever kept me balanced enough to become successful and rich, in order to support my then-husband's "sobriety," and that led to massive bipolar troubles that were all capped off with tons of psychiatrists and psychiatric drugs, none of which helped with my problems at all and, in face, made them even worse.
Barr's hilarious 2006 HBO special "Blonde and Bitchin'" contained her trenchant observation, "The War on Drugs is a war on poor people using street drugs waged by rich people on prescription drugs." She repeated the line during a rousing stump speech delivered at Oaksterdam University (pictured) while running for US President (and Prime Minister of Israel) in 2012.
In 2013, Barr joined 174 other prominent women (and men) signing an open letter to Obama calling for an end to the injustice of the war on drugs.