Plantsofpower 2 Rc

Plants of Power, a six-part radio series about mind-altering drugs in nature and culture.

Written and presented by Nick Rankin, Plants of Power, Program 3, Industrial Power.

All of the plants that we discuss as being narcotic have all had sacred context.

Now all of the context has been lost and this is what we need to re-establish and understand.

Emeritus professor of botany, William M. Bowden, author of the classic work, Narcotic Plants.

One of the oldest of these is the opium poppy, Papava Somniferum.

It's been cultivated for thousands of years for food and as a painkiller.

Opium was also deeply bound in with the religion of the ancient Greeks.

I believe the historical traditional use of opium was that of associating it with the gods

because we know that it was consecrated to Nyx, the god of night, to Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams, and to Thanatos, the god of death.

So it was known in a sacred context.

And one of the dilemmas of our own society is that we make categories that didn't then exist.

For example, among the North American Indian, food and medicine were one word and the concept was one.

And even religion becomes involved with these.

And there was a broader context for understanding these plants.

And how does the drug come out of the poppy?

For a long time, opium would be known only through the crude opium, which is achieved by growing the plant until it blossoms.

And then after the blossoms fall, depending on the nature of the collagen, within three to twelve days,

you may gather a latex by slicing the green capsule.

It forms a seed capsule that is filled with seed.

And if you don't cut it deeply, you can still harvest the seed from it.

And so this white milk oozes out.

A few days later, this can be scraped from the capsule as a gum.

The gum made into balls.

And these crude balls of opium, ranging in size, of course, probably from initially maybe the size of a marble

to ultimately the size of baseballs, these were shipped around the world.

And they weren't kept in any one area for long because we know that it was a very short time before the plant was grown

in areas like India, Turkey, and pretty soon Burma, Assam.

Now, one of the great centers of cultivation is Colombia.

We worry about the problems with coca in Colombia, but there are also enormous crops of the opium poppy.

For 125 years, opium was one of the most profitable export crops the British Empire had in India.

In 1850, opium alone earned 20% of the subcontinent's revenue.

Every chest of prime opium from the Ganges plain contained 40 cannonballs of narcosis weighing a kilo and a half each.

Thousands of these 60 kilo chests were exported on fast sailing ships to China to make addicts of the Chinese pipe dreamers

and to spearhead other trade and other missions.

The Chinese really wanted more valuable things than this, what they called black foreign mud.

This was their name for opium in Chinese, it translates as black foreign mud, and yet it was forced upon them.

The Portuguese forced it upon them initially, and then it continued until finally they had to fight in around 1840

of the first opium war, and 15 years later, the second opium war, to finally rid the country of this habit that had been pushed upon them.

The crude opium contains a lot of other toxins.

This is the dilemma of the use of crude opium, and also the problem with those who smoke it.

The rich classes would smoke pure opium, raw opium, and those who couldn't afford to do that would use the draw,

which was left over in the pipe, and that was left with febaine, papaverine, narcotine,

and other strychnine-like alkaloids that have a very profound effect on the system

and can lead to death in a very short time.

And so we had classes of people, according to their ability, to pay for these various kinds of opium.

And pay the Chinese people did.

That's how Britain's last colony, Hong Kong, first got on its feet,

with the drug-running business done by the likes of William Jardine and James Matheson,

men who made their shameful fortunes and then shamelessly retired to England to become members of Parliament.

Benjamin Disraeli recognised the type in 1845.

Oh, a dreadful man, he wrote in his novel Sybil.

A Scotchman, richer than Croesus, one Mr. Druggy, fresh from Canton,

with a million in opium in each pocket, denouncing corruption and bellowing free trade.

Opium smoking was the servitude of Asians.

Progressive Europe, with its industrial and scientific revolutions, could do far better,

according to Professor Roy Porter of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.

From the beginning of the 19th century, chemists begin to subject raw natural opium to chemical analysis in the laboratory.

And that takes place particularly in France and in Germany.

There's a French pharmacist called Seguin, and then a German pharmacist called Sertuna.

And these are the key figures here.

Seguin is the man who isolates morphine, as we call it nowadays, from opium.

You take raw opium, sort of put it in the test tube, boil it up, add alkaline substances in order to remove impurities,

and you end up with a nice, clean, clear, crystalline substance.

Seguin didn't really understand what he'd got, but the German pharmacist, Seguin did.

He knew that it was alkaline, he knew it was special, and it was from then that morphine regularly became extracted from raw opium.

Now, there's another development in science that's very important linked to morphine and other drugs,

and that's the invention of the hypodermic syringe.

What does this represent in science, and how did it come about?

Always the problem with drugs, whether they are medical drugs or illegal narcotics,

is how do you get it into the body, how do you get it into the system?

And it wasn't really until the 1830s that the idea of injecting drug substances into the bloodstream

by the use of a syringe became really tested.

Now, syringes were old, but the new idea of a hypodermic syringe, using a syringe with a hollow needle

to inject under the skin and directly into a vein, that really was developed in the 1850s.

There was a great big dispute amongst the doctors then as to who it was who had really invented the hypodermic syringe,

but on the whole, we nowadays in this country think that it was a Scotsman, Alexander Wood,

who was the first person who really popularised that.

And once you got the syringe, then it became possible to inject morphine directly.

The effect was much more rapid and much more powerful.

It's one of the terrible ironies of history that the first person to die of an overdose of drugs

that were injected hypodermically was indeed Alexander Wood's wife.

And this is symbolic of something that was happening in the 19th century,

which is that doctors were very, very keen on the effects of morphine

because it was a wonderful painkiller, there's no doubt about that.

There was a great deal of dispute and doubt and uncertainty about how far these drugs really were addictive or not.

One of the theories in favour of the injection of drugs beneath the skin directly into the bloodstream

was the belief that that method would not prove addictive.

It was only by eating or swallowing drugs that addiction would follow.

So there was a hope that you'd actually avoid addiction by hypodermic injection.

That, of course, is absolute bunkum, but that's the medicine learns by its mistakes.

And what you get from about the 1860s onwards is an enormous epidemic of what was called morphinism.

That's to say, addiction to morphine that was originally doctor-prescribed.

Doctors actually encouraged their patients to carry their own hypodermic syringes and to inject themselves.

It was thought then to be fairly safe. It proved a complete disaster.

There were more addicted women in the latter half of the 19th century than any other class.

We usually think, oh, it must be a lower class person or a black person or some other person.

No, it was white, middle class to upper middle class women who were being addicted by physicians.

And the reason for this was if they had a migraine headache, which was common, they were given opiates.

And if they had tight corsets that cut off their circulation, they had poor digestion, they were given opiates.

Just any disease, it was the cure-all for a while.

And then morphine addiction became so common that the synthetic heroin was produced,

and heroin was thought of as a cure for morphine.

Heroin is a sort of derivative from morphine.

You make heroin by boiling up basic morphine with another substance called acetic anhydride.

And then you get this hyper-concentrated form of opium in the form of heroin.

It was first made in London in St. Mary's Hospital in the 1870s,

but then it was manufactured by the German buyer pharmaceutical company from the late 1890s.

It was on the open market, you could buy in lozenges and pastels, as well as in liquid form.

And it was recommended as a cough remedy, as a remedy for tuberculosis and things like that,

and as a great painkiller.

And it proved infinitely more addictive than morphine.

So what was seen as a cure of morphinism turned out to worsen it.

Why is it called heroin?

The people who developed heroin in the 1890s in Germany saw it as the most powerful reliever of pain ever.

It was a heroic remedy.

Heroish, the German word.

And so it got called heroin as a sort of brand name.

Andrew Weil, Dr. Andrew Weil, you're the author of From Chocolate to Morphine,

everything you need to know about mind-altering drugs.

It's true, isn't it, to say that when industrialized countries come across mind-altering plants,

they extract and increase the power, the potency and the power of these plants

by not treating them as natural plants anymore.

Yes, or even when they don't do that, they treat the plants in ways that maximizes abuse potential.

I think another interesting example to look at is tobacco.

Now here's a plant that is the chief sacred plant of many Indians in the Americas.

When the Spanish came to the Americas, they found Indians smoking tobacco.

They'd never seen anyone smoke before.

You know, smoking was unknown in the old world before 1492.

But if you look at the ways Indians were using tobacco then,

most of them were using it as a ritual drug.

The forms of tobacco in use were very harsh,

so you couldn't inhale them deeply and often to form the pattern of addiction that we see in our cultures today.

There are Indians in the Amazon that build giant cigars of very strong tobacco,

and on feast occasions they take turns puffing on these things and get very high from it.

But they don't do it very often.

This is an occasional use.

I have an Indian friend, a shaman of a tribe in California.

One of his titles is a smoke doctor, and he uses a lot of tobacco smoke in his healing ceremonies.

He was taught by his elders that tobacco smoke is to be taken into the mouth, blown out the nose and mouth,

that the smoke carries prayers to the spirit realm.

You're not supposed to inhale it.

He said that was a white man's mistake and that we're now paying for our error.

In America, just after the Civil War, the tobacco industry developed a new form of tobacco,

a new genetic strain and a new method of processing it that produced for the first time a smoking product,

the modern cigarette, which could be inhaled deeply and often.

And this establishes the brain pattern of dependence on nicotine, which is the root of tobacco addiction today

and the source of immense grief, as you know.

Here again is an example of, I think, where we've gone wrong with the drug plant,

that rather than seeing it as something to be used ritually, sacredly, perhaps occasionally,

we have maximized its harmful element in the way that we've prepared it and distributed it for use.

So here's a case where we haven't taken the drug out of the plant,

but nonetheless, we have maximized the destructive potential of that plant.

Tobacco was considered the great aphrodisiac.

Once a plant was spread as an aphrodisiac, its reputation became very, very great.

And we'll find with many of these sacred plants that was indeed the case, without any validity.

For example, even with chocolate, it was an aphrodisiac, and that's why it was spread so rapidly.

Tobacco traveled because of its reputation, but the tobacco seed is as small as can be imagined.

It's like dust.

You could literally hold a million tobacco seeds in your hand, in one hand.

So it was easy to pack up the seed.

And in any climate that was reasonably temperate for a brief time of the year,

you could grow at least one of the varieties of tobacco.

The tobacco was carried about as seed and was introduced to diverse parts of the world to be used in every imaginable form,

from snorting, snuffing, cigars, in every form.

And again, I would return to that idea that we're dealing with a seeming aphrodisiac, which is really not so.

But the idea that it does break neural synapse and it does give one a relief from the boredom of the day

or whatever ills might be plaguing one for a time leads to ultimately addiction.

And it seems like only recently we've been treating this as an addictive drug,

whereas I remember even in my own book I had treated it as an enigmatic,

I called it tobacco, the enigmatic narcotic.

And at that time, no one was treating tobacco as a narcotic.

Tobacco smoking began as shamanistic ritual in South America,

became democratized through the shared peace pipe of North America,

and has now been sold to everyone around the world by big business.

Andrew Weil insists that the active drug nicotine in the tobacco of cigarettes is highly addictive.

When you inhale tobacco smoke, this is a very direct way of introducing nicotine to the brain.

It's one step down from drilling a hole in your skull, putting a needle in and giving little pulses of nicotine to deep brain centers.

Inhalation of vapor is a very, very direct way of taking a drug into the brain.

And there are centers in the brain that respond very powerfully to nicotine.

And once this cycle is established, the brain craves nicotine about every 20 minutes.

And I think it's fascinating that although this is right in front of our eyes and something that everybody could see,

when I was in medical school in the late 60s, I was taught that cigarette smoking was not an addiction,

that it was a psychological habit, and therefore it wasn't important.

It wasn't anything we have to study.

Even though, as I said, right in front of our eyes we can see that people who use the substance have to use it every 20 minutes.

You know, there's nothing else like that.

And it took the medical profession a remarkably long time to begin looking for what was the basis of this behavior.

What happens is, though, that when you get an industry that can influence politics and create jobs and all the rest of it, you have vested interests.

Enormous vested interests.

Actually, in America, where I know the history of this quite well, tobacco was the first cash crop that the colonies had.

So it was the first thing that they could trade for money with England and with Europe.

So tobacco has always held a very special place in the economy of America and of England as well.

When I hear presidents of the United States, as a recent one did, calling for a drug-free America, I have to laugh.

You know, no one wants to see a drug-free America.

We'd like to see an America free of the drugs we don't like and don't make money off of.

But as for the ones we do, I mean, that's business as usual.

Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco company, exported 662.2 billion cigarettes last year.

That's over six packets for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

The 80% increase in foreign sales over the last few years is mainly to Asia.

William M. Bowden can see what's happening.

We spoke of the use of opium and the opium wars.

We're doing to Asia precisely what Great Britain was doing to China in the 19th century.

We're pushing all of our tobacco into Asia, and we're addicting as many people as we can,

trying to create Asian markets and literally forcing it upon these people.

We won't give them food, but we will give them tobacco.

There are so many goods that they need in terms of food and medicine,

and yet we give them tobacco because we need their addiction,

so they will be able to constantly purchase tobacco from us.

We've touched on opium and tobacco, so how about cocaine to make a trinity?

Yet again, we seem to have taken the wrong path, according to Andrew Weil.

The whole history of coca and cocaine, I think, is probably the best example we could find

of what you should not do with one of these drug plants.

You know, we came to South America, and the Spanish did, saw Indians chewing coca.

Their immediate reaction was that this was something satanic and horrible,

and they tried to stamp it out.

They quickly found that they couldn't do that, in particular,

that if they wanted Indians to work for them in their mines, they had to give them coca.

Then they began to tax coca and take control over it.

But they never tried it themselves.

Again, they saw this as a dirty habit of people who they considered subhuman,

and they didn't try it themselves, even though Indians told them that this was a superior remedy

and very good for the Constitution and helpful with altitude sickness and so forth.

It took a remarkably long time before European scientists took any interest in coca,

really not until the middle 1800s.

And then very shortly after they did, a German scientist isolated cocaine from the leaf.

And cocaine was released to the world as the active essence of coca that embodied all of its principles.

So research on coca leaf stopped, and everyone began experimenting with cocaine.

And as you know, in the 1880s, cocaine was widely promoted by the medical profession as a cure-all for everything.

And widespread addiction followed in the wake of that, so this was entirely medically created.

And then when there was a great public outcry about the harmfulness of cocaine,

the medical profession took the position, as it has in many instances since then, that it was not their fault,

that the problem was that the drug itself was bad, with no redeeming qualities,

and that the ultimate source of the badness was the plant itself.

So cocaine was banned, instantly creating a black market for it.

And now we're at the other end of this, where our society is now relentlessly involved

with trying to eradicate coca in South America and prevent Indians from using it, because we blew it.

So, to the rescue, once again, the greatest ethnobotanist of this century,

Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University,

who's dedicated his whole life to understanding how American Indians use plants.

Richard Evans Schultes sent his best student, the late Timothy Plowman, to South America

to study the plant erythroxylon coca.

In his much-praised book, One River, the anthropologist Wade Davies has written about both men.

Tim Plowman was Schultes' protege.

I once asked Mrs. Schultes whether Tim had been as close as a son to the great professor,

and she shook her head and said, no, closer than his son.

Tim was the world's expert on coca.

In the early 1970s, Schultes sort of managed to do the impossible,

secure from the U.S. government a quarter million dollars to study this plant,

known as the divine leaf of immortality and, of course, a notorious source of cocaine.

And even though the cartel was emerging,

and even though the efforts to eradicate the fields had been underway for over 50 years at that point,

astonishing little was known about coca.

Nobody knew how many species yielded the alkaloid.

Nobody knew anything about the pharmacology of coca chewing.

Nobody had even done a nutritional study of the plant,

even though it had not only been maligned by physicians,

but it was something that was consumed every day by literally millions of South American Indians.

And so on a journey made possible by Schultes,

inspired by him and certainly infused at all times with his spirit,

Timothy and I traveled the length and breadth of South America,

studying the ethnobotany and the taxonomy of this most wondrous plant of the Inca.

And what we found was really quite amazing.

I mean, at one level, coca symbolized the very fabric of Andean life.

There was no gesture that could be begun without some kind of use of the coca leaf.

When you met people on the trail, you didn't shake hands, you traded leaves.

Distances were measured in the Andes, not in miles or kilometers, but in coca shoes.

There were societies where the entire societal ideal was to abstain from sex eating and sleeping

and do nothing but chew the sacred leaves and chant to the ancestors.

There were coca diviners who read the future and the venation of the leaves,

a skill that could only be possessed by someone who had successfully survived a lightning strike.

And the Inca themselves, unable to cultivate the plant at the elevation of the imperial capital of Cusco,

had actually replicated it in gold and silver leaf in fields that colored the landscape.

And when we did the first nutritional study of the plant, what Tim found was rather astonishing.

It turned out that coca, yes, it had a small amount of cocaine in it, half to one percent dry weight,

roughly analogous to the amount of caffeine in a coffee bean,

amount of cocaine absorbed in a very mild and natural form through the mouth in a slow fashion that left it completely benign,

a mild stimulant in a harsh environment.

But what Tim also found in the plant, much to the regret, I think, of our backers of the U.S. government,

was it turned out that this plant was just chock full of vitamins.

Not only was it full of vitamins, it had more calcium in it than any plant that had ever been studied by the USDA,

which made it perfect for the diet of the Andes that traditionally lacked a milk product, particularly for women that were nursing.

It also turned out to have enzymes in it, which enhanced the body's ability to digest carbohydrate at high elevation,

which made it perfect, of course, for the traditional potato crop diet of the Andes.

So in one single gesture of research, if you will, Tim showed that this plant was a benign stimulant

that in 4,000 years of being used by Indian peoples and all the pre-Colombian civilizations of South America,

in the Andes, rather, had never shown any evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction,

and that it was a fundamental part of the nutritional regime of the people themselves.

So this plant that had been so maligned was revealed to be what it was, the true divine leaf of immortality.

And this revelation, in some sense, put into stark contrast the draconian efforts,

financed and organized and promoted by the U.S. government,

that certainly persist even more so today than they did 20 years ago,

to poison the coca fields with all the various herbicides and insecticides

that today pollute the headwater rivers of Mother Amazon herself.

By the way, I think it's also worth noting that our drug policies, which in the U.S. began about 1914

with the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act, which mentioned cocaine,

have directly led to the disappearance of coca and coca products from our world,

while encouraging an ever-expanding black market in cocaine, which is easy to smuggle.

I mean, nobody's going to smuggle coca leaves, which are bulky and have very low amounts of the drug,

and everybody's going to try to smuggle this concentrated white powder, which is worth so much money.

So I think our drug laws and drug policies have directly contributed to the wave of abuse that we have

by driving out of circulation the natural form of the drug, which has a much, much lower abuse potential,

and encouraging commerce in this isolated chemical, which has a very high potential for abuse.

And therefore encouraging gangsterdom, criminality, violence.

And all of it, all of it. As I said, it's a real object lesson in what not to do when you encounter a drug plant in the world.

I think the history of coca and cocaine provides the best illustration of all the things that we've done wrong,

culminating now, as I said, with our attempts to prevent natives in South America from using their sacred leaf.

Plants of Power. A six-part radio series about mind-altering drugs in nature and culture.

Written and presented by Nick Rankin.

Plants of Power. Program 4. Alcohol Power.

The discovery of most of our major psychoactive drugs came from early man watching animals.

Dr. Ron Siegel, who's been researching animal behavior with drugs for 25 years.

For example, the legendary discovery of coffee was by an Abyssinian shepherd who noticed that his goats became abnormally frisky

after eating the bright red fruit of this plant.

And when he tried the fruit, he found that indeed he became a little frisky too.

And that's how coffee was discovered.

Coca, from which cocaine comes, was discovered the same way according to folklore.

By native Andean Indians watching their llamas and their alpacas eating these leaves.

And they copied the behavior.

Almost all of our drug plants seem to have been modeled after animal use.

For example, elephants really don't have a lot of drug plants in their environment.

But they have very keen olfactory receptors.

And they can pick up the scent of fermented fruit from long distances up to 75 miles away with a good wind.

And they will migrate out of their way in Africa to get to this fruit.

Now, this fruit is only about 8% alcohol.

It's enough to get them a little tipsy and a little shaky on their feet.

But that's about it.

When they accidentally wander into moonshine distilleries, they might drink stronger alcohol.

And then...

You're welcome.

There's something that's gonna happen in there.

You're welcome.

As you may have...

Yes, you're welcome.

You're welcome.

I'm running on the Пред Keyes.

Then they will engage in some rather nasty drunken behavior where they become extremely aggressive,

they smash village huts, they stampede, and they have even been known to trample people.

I have seen large vats of brew, fermenting millet in fact, emptied by elephants at night.

They've come to a village and they've emptied the vat. That I have seen.

The zoologist and artist Jonathan Kingdon was born and bred in East Africa.

Any animal that associates a particular food or a drink with pleasure in any shape or form is quite easily habituated to that.

I know that a monkey that I was brought up with as a small child started to bite me and my friends

and was given to somebody and later we heard that it became a total drunkard.

This was a baboon because he was a heavy drinker himself, took it off to the pubs

and used to delight in filling it up with Tusker beer

and it used to fall off its stool to the great amusement of people.

Very cruel and unnecessary and unpleasant.

But, I mean, what it does demonstrate is that primates particularly are susceptible to alcohol

and primates would be, probably of all animals, perhaps with the exception of pigs,

the most likely to come across what is effectively alcoholic beverages

in the form of great quantities of fermenting fruit.

Dr. Andrew Weil, you've written a lot about drugs, particularly in two of your books,

From Chocolate to Morphine, Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs,

and your famous book from 1972, The Natural Mind, A New Way of Looking at Drugs and Higher Consciousness.

I want to talk about values now, because drug use and the cultures that use drugs

and what we call a drug and what we think of as food or something perfectly normal

is deeply tied up with the values of a culture and a society.

Now, even how we define a drug, you know, is sugar a drug, for example?

There are people that say they get high from sugar, and there are people who say they get addicted to sugar.

Is salt a drug?

You know, is alcohol a drug?

The body can metabolize it like a food.

It's clearly a poison in high doses.

It's a favored social intoxicant.

But I still very commonly hear the phrase drugs and alcohol as if alcohol is something different.

You know, so we have a certain set of associations to the word drug.

You know, drugs are good if they're being used by doctors for the purpose of healing.

They're bad if they're being used by people to get high for fun,

at least if it's not one of the drugs that we approve of.

So there's a great deal of value in all of this.

And the value is commercial, too.

Some scholars think that the plants of power are a staple of civilization,

basic to the trade that has tied the global village together.

These substances are not just part of the cultural history of humankind.

They are absolutely integral to the economic history at every stage.

Perhaps the precious metals are the ones that are the first stage of international trade.

But amongst the next level are these desirable organic consumables.

Andrew Sherratt, you teach archaeology.

You're in charge of the prehistoric collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

And you're also the co-editor of the volume of essays,

Consuming Habits, Drugs in History and Anthropology.

And you've written the first essay in this, which is called Alcohol and its Alternatives.

And one of your ideas in that is that, if you look back in history,

there are broadly two kinds of cultures.

There are smoking and chewing cultures, and then there are drinking cultures.

Can you explain that?

There's a lovely phrase in John Locke's Treatise on Civil Government,

which says, in the beginning, all the world was America.

And what he meant by that was that the picture presented by

the newly discovered Indians of North America

was a model for what the original condition of humanity might have been.

And in a sense, I think this is a very valuable perception,

because when we look at North America,

one of the interesting things is the importance of tobacco,

the pipe of peace, the ritual use of tobacco.

Not simply a hedonistic use, not simply being used for relaxation,

but a very, very powerful medicine,

and also a very powerful social tool.

Now, the evidence that we have from prehistoric Europe

clearly doesn't include things like tobacco pipes.

But there are, in fact, quite a large number

of rather enigmatic objects with open sides,

things that have traditionally been called incense cups or braziers.

And putting these two things together,

it seems to me entirely likely that what we're looking at

are a whole set of rituals based essentially

on the smoking and the inhalation of fumes from,

well, we have a number of plants to choose from,

but let's just leave it at that level for the moment

and say that there is evidence

that these little braziers were culturally important.

Well, we do have evidence from Herodotus

talking about the Scythians, where he saw them

throwing hemp seeds, cannabis seeds,

inside a tent, a triangular tent,

and they inhaled the fumes and howled like animals.

That's absolutely right,

and that's one of the best links back to this prehistoric situation.

And what really clinched it for me

was going into the hermitage in St. Petersburg

and seeing the objects from the frozen tombs of Paziruk

in the Altai Mountains in the other end of Siberia,

and they are absolutely exactly the set of equipment

described by Herodotus.

There is the framework of a little tent,

there are the bronze braziers,

still with the coals inside them,

still with the charcoal,

and indeed still with hemp seeds.

It is absolutely astonishing

that something that was interred in the ground

in 500 BC, or thereabouts,

frozen in the permafrost,

because that's how these things have been

so miraculously preserved,

should give such a direct reflection

of what Herodotus talks about

in Book 4 of his histories.

So, we can trace back

a millennial old tradition,

because these little smoking cups,

these little braziers,

are found in tombs,

the pottery moms,

are found in tombs,

going right back to 3000 BC or before.

And that, I think,

was the general pattern

before drinking,

before the consumption of alcohol,

took precisely the prime cultural role

that it now has.

The first book of the Bible

is full of stories

about the plants of power.

The first woman, Eve,

gives the first man, Adam,

a mind-altering fruit,

and together they fall

from the hunter-gatherer's paradise

into the hard work

of early farming.

Their two sons

divide the labor.

One becomes a herder,

the other

a tiller of the soil.

The one who grows the vegetables

is jealous of his more nomadic,

freer brother.

This earth-digger,

whose name is Cain,

kills his animal-driving brother,

Abel.

Then the first murderer

goes east,

and in the land of Nod

he founds the first city.

This could be the myth

of the first cities

of Mesopotamia,

the land between two rivers,

the Tigris and the Euphrates,

in the country

that is now called Iraq.

It's important that Cain

is a digger

and a planter

and a winemaker

in this story,

because,

as I put it to Andrew Sherrod,

there is no civilization

without cultivation first,

and urban culture

depends on agriculture.

What happened

in Western Asia

from 6,000 B.C.

or so onwards

was the development

of a second generation

of products,

things like

the tree crops,

things like

these sugar and oil-rich

olives,

as the oil crop,

vines,

and particularly dates,

as the sugar-rich fruits,

which, of course,

were very easily fermented.

And my own view

is that it was

with the date

that fermentation

first became

a process

that humans

were familiar with

and then tried

to transfer

to other sorts

of products.

Now, civilization,

the living in cities,

spreads out of Mesopotamia

around the Mediterranean,

you think of Greece,

all these things

are associated

with wine.

But in your essay,

you point out

that there are

drier peoples

who come out

of the desert

and the semi-desert

and out of the steppes.

Can you tell me

how, say,

the rise of Islam,

which is not

a wine-based culture,

came about?

Well, let's go back

to my original formulation

that, as it were,

the aboriginal state

of humanity

in Europe

was a set

of smoking cultures

or chewing cultures

using the

psychoactive plants

from their native flora.

Remember that

the opium poppy

is part of

the West Mediterranean

flora.

On the east,

cannabis is a steppe plant

and was used,

as we were saying,

back into the

fourth millennium

and almost certainly

before.

So these things

have age-old usages,

but I think

what one can see

in Europe

is the tremendous

prestige associated

with drinking

and the elaborate

gold and silver

drinking vessels

that were made

for the elites

of the period.

So the development

of alcohol

had this tremendous

effect on the areas

which were capable

of producing

the sugars

that were fermentable

into this

marvellous drink.

But in areas,

dry areas like

the steppes

or the deserts,

which were not

areas where

grapes could be

grown or where

sugar-rich

fermentable crops

could be grown,

then the habits

of smoking,

the habits of

taking narcotic

substances

by inhalation

continued to be

the basis

of social life.

And indeed,

the difference

became,

as it were,

a badge of identity

that the people

who came out

of the desert

increasingly

during the first

millennium BC

and in the first

millennium AD

to dominate

the town dwellers

hard-riding

camel-riding

nomads

who despised

things like

the use of the wheel,

who despised

the drinking of wine,

who despised

the use of

silver vessels

and all the luxury

and ostentation

and degenerate

city life

that went with it,

in a sense,

they created

their own identity

in opposition

to this

by emphasising

what was different

about their own

way of life.

And so we have

this proscription

of wine drinking

which in a sense

is an attack

on all

that city-dwelling

Mediterranean

civilisation

stands for.

It sums it up

so perfectly

as the quintessential

product

and consumable

of its

everyday life

and indeed

of its religions.

And so

to proscribe this,

to forbid it,

was a very

powerful

ideological statement.

But of course

what wasn't

forbidden

was the consumption

of the kinds

of stimulants

or narcotics

that were

traditionally

in use

in the desert.

And further south

the use of coffee

on a very small scale

the berries

were originally

chewed

was typical

of the way

in which

things like

cola nuts

in West Africa

things like

gut

in East Africa

and Somalia

were used

as stimulants.

So these

came to have

much greater

cultural prominence.

These

and things

like cannabis.

As I've said

I think that

almost every culture

uses

intoxicants.

We tend

to see

the intoxicants

we use

as being good

or okay

and the intoxicants

that other people

use as being bad.

But there's no

agreement

from culture

to culture

as to which

are the good

substances

and which

are the bad

substances.

You know

if you're

in the mainstream

in our cultures

alcohol

is our

chiefly accepted

substance

mind-altering

substance

but if you're

a Muslim

that's the

big bad

drug

and all

the things

that are said

that we say

that marijuana

does to people

for example

they say

alcohol

does to people

and sometimes

within countries

you find

different

subpopulations

who are

at war

with each other

and their

different choices

and intoxicants

become symbols

of the differences.

For example

in Peru

Peru is a

country with

two nations

that have always

been at war

since the

Spanish conquest.

There's a

Spanish-speaking

mestizo population

with its capital

at sea level

at Lima

that uses

alcohol

as its

preferred

mind-altering

substance

and an

Indian

Quechua-speaking

nation

with its capital

at high altitude

in Cusco

that uses

coca leaf

as its

chief substance.

I was in

Ethiopia

some years ago

and there

you have

a Christian

alcohol-drinking

majority

and a

Muslim

minority

that chews a leaf

called

kat

which is the

closest thing

that nature

produces to

amphetamines

and within

these countries

there are

incredible

tensions

and the

choice of

intoxicant

becomes symbolic

of a whole

subculture.

The coffee

cantata

written by

J.S.

Bach

in 1733

I must

have coffee

pour me

coffee

In the 17th

and 18th

centuries

tea and

coffee became

the new

and fashionable

stimulants

of the cities

of Europe

Both hot drinks

brewed from

leaves and berries

respectively

contain caffeine

which excites

and alerts

the cerebral

cortex

but this

became a

socially

acceptable

addiction

To a certain

extent

there was

a replay

of this

tension

between

alcohol

and non-alcohol

in the sense

that alcohol

is very much

associated with

the land-owning

aristocracy

and therefore

a rising middle

class

in the same

way

wanting to

differentiate

itself

wanting to

create its

own identity

its own

sense of

respectability

naturally

promoted

tea

and coffee

and these

stimulating

substances

that kept

you awake

rather than

alcohol

that tends

at least

with me

to send

one to

sleep

this is

what the

middle

classes

did

the cup

that cheers

but not

inebriates

as Cooper

so wonderfully

put it

and

and so you

get a

sort of

replay

of

this

cultural

divide

between

christianity

and islam

but now

on social

grounds

between

the aristocracy

and the

bourgeoisie

expressed in

the temperance

movement

the temperance

movement

which urged

people to

moderate

their alcohol

drinking

or to

abstain

altogether

reached its

peak in

the united

states of

america

a country

which began

as a puritan

experiment

but whose

history has

always been

awash with

alcohol

in the

colony

in the

republic

everybody

drank

you could

even see

the u.s.'s

expansion

westward

as a tide

of alcohol

once again

eradicating

the smoking

cultures

of the

plains dwellers

as the

wine of

civilization

had overcome

the barbarians

of old

europe

drink

ravaged

american

indian

cultures

and yet

booze

seemed

to be

spiritual

a kind

of

shortcut

for

vision

seeking

warriors

as

william

james

the father

of american

psychology

observed

in 1902

the sway

of alcohol

over mankind

is unquestionably

due to its

power to

stimulate

the mystical

faculties

of human

nature

sobriety

diminishes

discriminates

and says

no

drunkenness

expands

unites

and says

yes

it is in

fact

the great

exciter

of the

yes

function

in man

the drunken

consciousness

is one

bit

of the

mystic

consciousness

but now

it was time

to say

no

a coalition

of women

doctors

and clergy

began to

preach the

evils

of the

demon

drink

and the

temperance

movement

became

unstoppable

at the

beginning

of this

century

edward

bear

author

of

prohibition

the years

that changed

america

takes up

the story

around the

time of

the first

world war

1914 to

there was a

movement that

in a way

superseded the

wctu the

women's christian

temperance union

called the

anti-saloon league

which was

probably the

first modern

lobbying

movement in

america

financed by

the churches

but also by

large industrialists

like henry

ford

pierre dupont

general motors

edison

rockefeller

and they

managed to

turn the

anti-saloon league

into a very

powerful

financially rich

lobby

and this

lobby behaved

with utter

ruthlessness

wayne wheeler

who's now

completely forgotten

but was probably

the most important

behind the scenes

political figure

in america at the

time

he consciously

fostered an

anti-german

movement

and he attacked

the brewers

because he said

the brewers were

kind of

fifth columnists

in america

which was

totally untrue

but by the

time america

had entered

the war

there was

already the

feeling that

prohibition was

around the

corner

and it's

interesting

there's a

parallel that

over in

england

the licensing

laws that

restricted the

drinking time

under lloyd

george's

government

were also

introduced in

the first

world war

in order to

keep working

people in

the munitions

factories

in order

so business

and industry

were keen

on stopping

drink

for that

absolutely

another sort

of key

element

in all

this

is that

the american

industrial revolution

personified by

the ford

technique

of making

cars

the assembly

lines

meant that

for the first

time

you couldn't

afford to

have a kind

of drunken

or hungover

lumpen

proletariat

you needed

skilled

sober workers

which is why

henry ford

created a force

of private

policemen

who would

spy on

his workers

and a worker

who was caught

buying wine

or beer

or whiskey

in a shop

outside his

working hours

was first

warned

and if it

happened again

he was fired

so this is the

beginning of

mandatory drug

testing in the

workplace

absolutely

now the

falstead act

was passed

in 1920

calvin coolidge

called this one

of the greatest

social experiments

in the world

and it was

it lasted

13 years

here was a

major industrialized

country that

said we will

outlaw this

plant product

alcohol

we will make

people better

but as you've

already hinted

it all went

completely wrong

how did it go

wrong

well it went

wrong almost

immediately in the

sense that I think

on the night

after the

proclamation of

the law

a train

full of

whiskey was

hijacked

and this was

a sign of

things to come

when you consider

that whiskey

a bottle of whiskey

for instance

smuggled in

from Canada

could be sold

at 20

40 times

the original

cost

this meant

that people

were making

huge amounts

of money

and with

limited

amounts of

liquor coming

in because

it wasn't

easy

it wasn't

completely

trouble free

this meant

that the

gangs

were at

each other's

throats

to

commandeer

kidnap

hijack

stocks of

liquor

and most

for instance

of the

shootings in

Chicago

involved

rival gangs

who were

fighting over

quantities of

liquor that

one gang

brought in

and another

gang wanted

this is

for instance

the real

reason for

the St.

Valentine's

Day massacre

it was a

banal

commercial

dispute

that's what

it was

prohibition

ended in

it ended

as a

failure

didn't it

it ended

as a

complete

failure

many

of the

prohibitionists

became

anti-prohibitionists

because they

realized that

the moral

standards in

America had

just plummeted

and that

corruption

meant that

authority was

no longer

respected

even people

like John

D.

Rockefeller

and Rockefeller

in fact wrote

a letter that

was published

in the New York

Times which

was a kind

of tearful

confession

that he'd

been wrong

that the

prohibition that

he had worked

for hadn't

worked because

it had brought

in its wake

more criminality

more corruption

and indeed

disease and

death because

a lot of

the liquor

that was being

made locally

was lethal

and tens of

thousands of

people died

or were blinded

because of this

and there was a

great deal of

self-interest

among the

people like

the Rockefellers

because in

November

Wall Street

crashed

fortunes

were lost

the

country

itself

went into

a deep

depression

when a

country

is in

a deep

depression

it's very

difficult

to raise

taxes

simply to

keep the

government

the administration

going

so taxes

went up

and suddenly

belatedly

all these

moral

prohibitionists

realized

that

if only

one could

tax liquor

if only liquor

became legal

again

then they

themselves

would be paying

less taxes

alcohol

is taxed

and licensed

and is

thriving

now in

Britain

the drug

is being

marketed

to children

and to

young

people

as

alco-pops

flavored

with sugar

and fruit

juices

but we're

meant to be

in a global

war on drugs

this is a term

that irritates

Dr. Ron Siegel

there's not a war

on drugs

in any country

because I don't

see wars

on pharmaceutical

medicines

which are

far more

lethal

than heroin

and cocaine

wrapped up

together

I don't

see a war

on alcohol

really

which is

in the

United States

is killing

500 people

a day

I don't

see a

really

deliberate

war

on tobacco

which is

killing

in the

United States

a thousand

people a

day

I don't

see

helicopter

teams

trying to

eradicate

tobacco

plantations

in Kentucky

the way

we send

in

helicopter

teams

into

South

America

to

one person

not

one death

in the

medical literature

attributed to

chewing of

coca

now there

are probably

five to six

deaths a day

due to cocaine

that's of no

small concern

to those five

or six people

or their families

but from a

public health

point of view

that's a small

number

compared to

the larger

numbers of

alcohol

and tobacco

deaths

so we

only have

a war

against

some drugs

not others

and Dr.

Andrew

Weil

agrees

all this

while

we've been

living

with the

drug

which is

the most

dangerous

of all

alcohol

now this

is the

drug

which

any way

you look

at it

is the

most

toxic

it's the

one

that

is

chiefly

associated

with

toxic

behavior

it's

got a

very

high

association

with

suicide

with

homicide

with

violent

crime

of all

sorts

it's

the

only

one

that

causes

irreversible

medical

harm

and

as well

we've

been

living

with

tobacco

which

in the

form

of

cigarettes

is

the

most

addictive

drug

known

so it

seems

to me

that

there's

some

irony

here

that

while

we

periodically

become

upset

about

these

drugs

that

other

people

use

in

general

they

come

nowhere

near

the

potential

harm

of