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