High Society

Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture

Mike Jay

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500771327
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Explores the use of mind-altering substances from alcohol to cocaine worldwide throughout history. Beautifully illustrated with rarely seen material, this striking, rigorously researched book puts its controversial subject into the widest possible context. It paints vivid portraits of the roles that drugs play as medicines, sacraments, status symbols and trade goods from classical times through the mind-bending self-experiments of early scientists to the present 'war on drugs', and reveals how the international trade in substances such as tobacco, tea and opium shaped the modern world. "... deserves high praise for rendering a complex, controversial topic with clarity and elegance. It's also good looking... quite marvellous" - British Medical Journal

From Apothecary to Laboratory

What Is a Drug?

What is a ‘drug’? In the broadest sense, it is any substance – medicine or poison – that has a biochemical effect on either mind or body. But in the particular sense of a drug that acts on the mind, the term is more contested. ‘Drug’, in this sense, seems not to be a neutral description but a derogatory label to be avoided. According to the industries that produce and promote them, alcohol and tobacco are not drugs; cannabis advocates claim it is not a drug but a harmless herb or a valuable medicine, and LSD enthusiasts that it is not a drug but a sacrament. Producers of coca in South America readily admit that cocaine is a drug, but maintain that its source, the coca leaf, is not: it is, rather, a revered and time-honoured element of their traditional culture. Indigenous users of substances from ayahuasca to kava to betel are appalled by the suggestion that they might be classified as ‘drugs’.

Underlying the emotive connotations of the category ‘drug’ are two overlapping but separate understandings of the term. The first definition is purely descriptive: a drug is a substance that is psycho-active – that is, producing perceptible effects on consciousness. This is the domain of psychopharmacology, in which psychoactive drugs are classified more precisely as stimulants, sedatives, psychedelics, hypnotics, deliriants or dissociatives. In this strict sense, tea, cigars and Coca-Cola are (or, at least, contain) drugs as unambiguously as cocaine or heroin.

In popular usage, however, this clinical definition has been overshadowed by another meaning, less precise but more pervasive. Over the last century, ‘drug’ has come to mean a psychoactive substance that is illegal – or, perhaps more accurately, one that lacks cultural sanction for its psychoactive use. In this sense, cannabis is a drug while alcohol is not; model-airplane glue is a drug when inhaled by teenagers; khat chewed by immigrant Somali communities in the West is seen as a drug to the extent that the communities themselves are construed as a problem; and substances such as nitrous oxide or morphine are medicines when used by doctors, and drugs when used for pleasure. The classification of something as a ‘drug’ does not simply indicate the presence of a specific chemical substance: it is also determined by non-chemical factors such as the intention behind its use, the method of administration and the social class of the user.

These overlaps and confusions, however, are not an exclusively modern phenomenon. The concept of a drug is an ancient one that has been compounded over time from disparate sources and traditions. It has been blurred and enriched by new substances that have emerged from global trade and scientific advances, and by the experiments of those who have investigated these substances at first hand to explore the hidden workings of the mind.

Scientists sample a strange new drug in this illustration to a fantasy tale by Aleister Crowley, published in Idler magazine in 1909. This was an era when new mind-altering drugs were regularly discovered by chemists, doctors and psychiatrists experimenting on themselves. (The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Drugs in Antiquity

Although human engagement with drugs is effectively without a beginning, ‘drug’ as a concept emerged only with written history. The oldest and longest Egyptian medical text, the Ebers Papyrus, which dates from around 1600 BC, describes the roots, seeds and heads of the poppy plant; other texts suggest it was recognized as an analgesic, but it is impossible to be sure whether this effect was specifically attributed to its opium sap, or whether the plant was used, as it has apparently been since deep prehistory, for other purposes: food, medicine, incense or ritual. With the ancient Greeks, the notion of a drug came into sharper focus. Around 300 BC Theophrastus, a colleague of Aristotle, wrote two botanical treatises in which he designated certain plants as pharmaka, a term spanning the senses of ‘drug’, ‘cure’ and ‘poison’. A comparable range of meanings survives in the English word ‘intoxicant’, in which concepts of altered consciousness and poisoning are similarly entwined.

Drugs, however, were a comparatively small part of medicine in the classical world. The Hippocratic tradition that emerged in the decades before Theophrastus recognized their power to act in certain conditions, but tended to assign them only a minor role in the drama of healing. The physician’s art encompassed a spectrum of performance and ritual that involved not just the disease but the patient as a whole, drawing them in to perform their own cures. Medicinal drugs were catalogued and given broad characteristics, such as ‘purgative’ or ‘emollient’, but they were not magic bullets: they were suited to one type of patient rather than another, and prepared or administered in a variety of subtle ways, though most commonly stirred into oil and wine. Generalizing from one cure to another, as itinerant drug peddlers did with their wares, was regarded as ignorant and mechanistic: each patient’s therapy should be a bespoke creation.

Within this framework, the category of drugs was loosely defined, and hard to extricate from other categories such as foods (the distinction is not entirely clear today: we still use prunes as a remedy for constipation, and cloves as a palliative for toothache). Plant drugs were not conceived as chemical substances contained in the root, seed or flower, but as aspects of the plant’s overall personality. Modern ideas of drug chemistry and action were not sought for, or missed. Given the limited range of drugs available, and the considerable ability of good physicians to harness what is now known as the placebo effect, Hippocratic healing was a natural product of its age.

As knowledge of plants was systematized, the figure who came to be the unrivalled authority on their medical uses was Pedanius Dioscorides. Born in Asia Minor, in what is now south-eastern Turkey, shortly after the time of Christ, Dioscorides was perfectly placed to weave the disparate threads of botany and healing into the nascent discipline of pharmacy. The school of Tarsus, where he studied, had specialized in plants and medicine for generations: it was located at a crossroads, between Mediterranean Europe, Egypt and India, from where resins such as frankincense and spices such as cloves and cinnamon flowed into the West. Dioscorides’ Materia medica listed over a thousand drugs, classified by animal, vegetable or mineral origin, together with keenly observed descriptions of what each drug ‘did’ and instructions on how it should be used.

It is in Materia medica’s fourth chapter, on medicinal roots and herbs, that we find the first descriptions of many drugs with psychoactive effects loosely grouped together. Narcotic, stimulant and depressant effects are separated, though all are discussed within the framework of pharmacology rather than pleasure (‘causes sleep’, ‘causes frenzies’ or ‘eases pain’). Although he gives brief descriptions of their psychoactive effects, he is more focused on their dangers. For Dioscorides, the property that links mind-altering drugs, from the narcotic opium to the deliriant nightshades, is that they are ‘cold’ or ‘cooling’: by this he means that their effect, over increased doses, is to dull sensitivity to the outside world along a spectrum ranging from sedation or fever to sleep, and eventually to overdose and death. The leaves of the thornapple, Datura stramonium, for example, taken in liquid at a dose of one drachm (4 grams) produce ‘not unpleasant fantasies’; but two drachms overcomes the subject completely for three days, and four drachms is fatal. It was too crude, therefore, for Dioscorides to speak of ‘the effects’ of a drug: its properties lie not in the substance itself but the dose at which it is taken.

Renaissance Herbals

Dioscorides’ work remained the canonical authority on drugs for more than 1,500 years. The role of pharmakopola, or drug-sellers, in the classical world was taken over by the apothecaries of medieval Europe. These were seen as distinct from and inferior to physicians, who consulted in the Hippocratic manner and directed their patients to apothecaries only if drug prescriptions were needed. The remainder of the apothecary trade was with the general public, to whom they supplied ‘simples’ (mostly dried herbs) or ‘Galenics’, a range of standard compounds and preparations intended to rebalance the body’s humours, in accord with classical medical theory.

Dioscorides’ Materia medica remained a standard text until early modern times: this page of a German edition from 1549 recommends the use of mandrake wine before surgical operations. (Wellcome Library, London)

The word ‘drug’ came into common English usage around AD 1400, probably derived from the Dutch term for ‘dried goods’, and it was also around this time that the nature of drugs began to attract the curiosity of the emerging humanists and natural philosophers. As new texts added to the store of chemical knowledge, practitioners gradually began to understand that drugs might be isolated as ‘pure’ substances that functioned independently of the plants that contained them, and that their effects on the mind might have a material and discoverable cause.

This process began around 1500 with the circulation of printed herbals, one of the earliest book genres to proliferate after the invention of movable type. A new edition of Dioscorides, published in 1499 and based on Greek manuscript sources that had been lost since antiquity, acted as a spur to the new learning. Herbals became more detailed and their drawings more naturalistic. Botanical gardens spread across Europe, and the first chair of botany was established at the University of Padua in 1533. By the end of the century thousands of plants had been identified, catalogued and illustrated.

An apothecary’s shop, from a text published in Augsburg, Germany in 1496. An apprentice prepares remedies with a pestle and mortar to add to the jars on the shelves, while learned apothecaries gather in the foreground. (Wellcome Library, London)

Illustrators at work on one of the most celebrated Renaissance herbals, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes published in Basel by Leonhard Fuchs in 1542. In 1703, Fuchs’s contribution to botany was commemorated in the name of the Fuchsia genus of flowering plants. (Wellcome Library, London)

The cannabis plant appears in many of these early works, though not for its psychoactive properties. European hemp, low in mind-altering cannabinoids, was mainly grown for textile production – its Latin name supplied the term ‘canvas’ – though it was also held to have medical virtues, such as the use of its seeds for headaches. As the new herbal conventions established themselves through the sixteenth century, mind-altering drugs came to be grouped loosely together under the rubric of ‘narcotics’. This was a category that united the opium poppy, by now well established as one of the most important remedies in the pharmacopeia, with the extensive and sinister family of intoxicant nightshades that included henbane, belladonna, datura, mandrake (mandragora), aconite (wolfsbane) and hemlock. These plants, held to be under the influence of Saturn, could be effective analgesics and sedatives but, as Dioscorides had stressed, dosage was critical: rather than aiding sleep, they might produce excitement and feverish hallucinations, or irregular heatbeats and frenzied seizures leading to heart-stopping convulsions, coma and death. Combined carefully with opium, they made a potent, if ill-starred, brew, the ‘drowsy syrups’ of ‘poppy and mandragora’ that by the time of Shakespeare’s Othello had become proverbial agents of oblivion.

Fuchs’s herbal details the medical uses of around 500 plants, arranged in alphabetical order. The book includes entries on the cannabis plant, the poppy and the mandrake, assembling the opinions of classical authorities alongside carefully observed and lavishly printed illustrations. (Wellcome Library, London)

Witches and Flying Ointments

It is striking that fifteen centuries after Dioscorides, the repertoire of European plant drugs seems to have remained limited to the dark spectrum of narcotics and deliriants, all toxic and potentially fatal. It may be simply botanical accident that the rich stimulant and mind-expanding flora of the New World was absent from Europe. It is also possible that the earlier transition of the Old World peoples to settled agriculture made them less engaged with the native wild pharmacopeia than was the case for the nomadic hunter-gatherers of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• Foreword
• A Universal Impulse
• From Apothecary to Laboratory
• The Drugs Trade
• Notes and Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright