HIGH SOCIETIES - THE CENTRAL ROLE OF MIND-ALTERING DRUGS IN HISTORY AND CULTURE
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| (Photo Richard Evans Schultes) |
As the sun tracks across towards the afternoon, the rooftop terraces of Yemen’s medieval mud-brick cities fill with men gathering to converse and chew khat through the scorching heat of the day. Across the concrete jungles of the Middle East, millions without the means for a midday meal make do with a heap of sugar stirred into a small cup of strong black tea. As the working day in Europe draws to a close, the traffic through the bars of the city squares begins to pick up, and high-denomination euro notes are surreptitiously exchanged for wraps of cocaine and ecstasy. In the cities of West Africa, the highlife clubs are thick with cannabis smoke, while in the forests initiates of the Bwiti religion sweat their way through their three-day intoxication by the hallucinogenic root iboga, during which they see the visions that will guide them through the passage to adulthood.
When daylight reaches the western hemisphere, it illuminates the broadest spectrum of drug cultures on the planet. Across North America’s cities, the sidewalks throng with office workers clutching lattes and espressos, while giant trucks thunder down interstate highways delivering tobacco and alcohol on a scale now rivalled by the industrial marijuana plantations concealed in giant polytunnels and warehouses among the forest tracts of California and Canada. Further south, the Huichol people of Mexico, despite the mesh fences and enclosures spreading across their ancient hunting grounds, still make their desert pilgrimage to harvest peyote cactus for their rituals, while street children in the barrios of Colombia and Brazil stupefy themselves with petrol-soaked cocaine residue and aerosol sprays. And in the Amazon, dozens of tribes, as they have since time immemorial, squat around fires powdering, toasting and brewing the seeds, roots and leaves of the world’s most diverse mind-altering flora.
Finally the sun sets across the islands of the south Pacific, the most remote outposts of humanity. Here, almost all the drugs consumed by the rest of the world remain unknown: even alcohol and tobacco are costly imports, rare outside the urban centres. But from the middle of the afternoon, the men have been drifting in from their gardens and plantations to grate, chew and soak kava root for their evening brew.
As the sun sets, they congregate in huts to drink it from coconut shells and share some whispered conversation, or squat alone on the beach to listen to its voice in the surf, as the sunset fades to darkness.
THE EVOLUTION OF DRUGS
Drug cultures are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less ubiquitous among our species. The celebrated list of ‘human universals’ compiled by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes ‘mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances’ as one of the essential components of human culture, along with music, conflict resolution, language and play. But there is little consensus regarding the origins of this universal impulse, which essential human traits it serves and how far back into our past its roots extend. Some have posited a primordial moment of discovery when proto-humans first encountered plants that expanded their minds to generate new forms of thought and language. Others have argued that such a moment may be encoded in our shared origin myths, perhaps in stories of a fruit that bestowed the knowledge of good and evil. Nevertheless, it seems that the discovery of intoxicants is a drama in which even the remote human past is a very recent episode. The plants that contain these substances evolved alongside our animal antecedents, and many developed such chemicals because of their physiological effects on creatures like ourselves. We were taking drugs long before we were human.
Drugs, and our response to them, are the product of an elaborate evolutionary dance between the plant and animal kingdoms that has been underway for at least 300 million years. Coniferous trees began producing tannins to deter fungal parasites, and bitter saponines to repel wood-boring insects. Flowering plants, when they emerged during the Cretaceous period, developed more complex nitrogen-based alkaloids in their fruit and leaves. These compounds, typically bitter to the taste, are toxic to some animals but produce pleasant effects in others. The capsaicin in chilli peppers, for example, is both a deterrent and a stimulant, killing parasites but encouraging the release of endorphins in mammals (while birds, on which the chilli depends for its dispersal, lack the chemical receptor that causes it to function as an irritant). Plant families often generate a spectrum of related alkaloids with both mental and physical effects: the nightshades, for example, manufacture the poisons in raw potatoes, the bug-killing and brain-rewarding nicotine in tobacco, and the hallucinogenic deliriants in daturas and belladonna.
ANIMAL INTOXICATION
Long before humans first appeared, this profuse natural pharmacopeia encouraged an equally wide variety of drug-seeking behaviours. Many animals root out and consume plant drugs for medical purposes – to poison intestinal parasites, for example – but there are also abundant examples of the deliberate pursuit of intoxication. Cats abandon themselves to the ecstasy of catnip, which has little effect on humans but causes felines to head-twitch, salivate, give love-bites and apparently experience sexual hallucinations: in the wild, the plant may perform the function of bringing females into heat. Siberian bears and reindeer seek out fly agaric mushrooms and appear to relish their mind-altering effects. Migrating birds make regular seasonal detours to gorge on fermented fruits. For many villages across the Indian subcontinent, a herd of drunken elephants on the rampage after feasting on rotten windfalls or raiding illegal stills is an all too familiar hazard. Our closest relatives, the primates, display many sophisticated drug-seeking behaviours. Baboons chew tobacco in the wild, and apes in captivity readily learn the habit of smoking it. Male mandrills in Gabon have even been observed to dig up and eat the hallucinogenic iboga root, then wait for an hour for its effects to take hold before engaging rivals in combat.
In many human cultures, the origin stories of plant-derived drugs involve tales of people observing and copying the habits of animals. In Ethiopia, for example, the discovery of coffee is attributed to goatherders who observed their flock becoming frisky and high-spirited after consuming coffee beans. Goats are very fond of coffee, and modern plantations must be robustly fenced against them; their taste for the effects of caffeine may have prompted the plant, which spreads its seeds via animal droppings, to produce it. Theirs is a long-standing symbiosis, though human participation in the cycle is relatively new. The practice of coffee drinking seems only to have developed around the tenth century AD–recently enough, perhaps, for the legends of its discovery to have some historical validity. It seems plausible that the practice of roasting the seeds of one among many hard, bitter and inedible desert shrubs and then percolating boiling water through them might have emerged only in modern times, and with some peculiar prompting.
Plants, then, use their drugs to nudge and manipulate the animal kingdom, repelling some species and attracting others; but what benefits do animals derive from drugs? It is often assumed that they consume them instinctively for chemical rewards: the stimulation of neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin, and the pleasurable sensations they deliver to the brain. Indeed, the modern neurological understanding of drugs leans heavily on the responses of laboratory animals: the ‘addictiveness’ of substances such as cocaine and opiates is measured by, for example, how many times a caged rat will press a lever to receive a dose. But there is more to animal drug-taking than reflex response. Environment is also a factor: many animals, for example, are more inclined to take drugs in captivity. This tendency was explored in a startling series of experiments by the Canadian addiction psychologist Bruce Alexander.
Alexander’s clinical work involved tests on laboratory rats. Initially the rats were kept individually in small cages with two drinking bottles, one containing plain water and the other morphine solution, which were weighed daily to generate behavioural data. But Alexander became curious about the effects of environment, and constructed alongside the cages a habitat that became known as Rat Park. Several rats, who are naturally gregarious, were housed together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the surrounding walls.
In Rat Park, he discovered, drug use diminished markedly: some rats reduced their morphine intake to one-twentieth that of their caged neighbours. Even if pre-addicted to morphine, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintain their habit. When the morphine water was sweetened with sugar, most of the rats still chose plain water, though they would drink the sugared water if Alexander also added naloxone, which blocks morphine’s effects. It seemed that the standard experiments were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the stresses inflicted on lab rats caged in solitary confinement, with catheters inserted into their jugular veins.
Such experiments do not disprove the claim that animals take drugs for their chemical rewards, but they do indicate that the impulse to take drugs is more than a simple behavioural reflex. In humans, of course, the variables become far more complicated. Sensory pleasure is an obvious component of most drug use, though the definitions of pleasure are as varied as human culture itself. But some drugs offer strictly functional benefits. The ability to alter consciousness in dramatic but controllable ways has many uses, and there is much evidence to suggest that humans have long used such drugs instrumentally: even, in some cases, elaborating their entire social systems around the heightened states of consciousness such substances produce.
DRUGS AND SHAMANISM
Perhaps the earliest drug artefacts in the archaeological record are two chillum-style pipes fashioned from hollowed-out puma bones, excavated in 1973 from a cave high in the Andes of north-west Argentina and radiocarbon-dated to before 2000 BC. The pipes were found to contain the burnt residue of the seeds of the mountain shrub Anadenanthera, a rich source of dimethyltryptamine. DMT, as it is known, is among the most powerful naturally occurring hallucinogens. When smoked or snuffed in sufficient quantities, it produces a rapid reaction of extreme nausea and often convulsive vomiting, accompanied by a few minutes of exquisitely strange, beautiful or terrifying visions.
With the appearance of monumental architecture in South America, the use of such drugs is attested in more detail. The ceremonial centre of Chavín, constructed in the Peruvian Andes in the centuries around 1000 BC, is surrounded by towering stone walls studded with a series of grotesque stone heads frozen in various stages of transformation from human to jaguar. As the heads grin and grimace, eyes bulging and fangs sprouting, streams of mucus pour from their noses: a telltale sign of the snuffing of powdered Anadenanthera seeds, which is further attested by the distinctive snuff trays excavated from similar sites across Peru, Bolivia and Chile. The drug’s effects were, it seems, understood as a process of shapeshifting between human and monstrous feline forms.
The notion that DMT-containing powders and potions transform their human subjects into animals – particularly predators, such as big cats or snakes – remains widespread throughout the many shamanic cultures of the Amazon region today. Animal transformation is not regarded as pleasurable: indeed, in both ancient and modern traditions it is represented as physically unpleasant and emotionally traumatic. Just as the stone heads on Chavín’s walls appear in a transport of agony rather than ecstasy, the Amazon cultures who still use DMT-containing snuffs, or infusions such as ayahuasca, typically describe the ordeal as terrifying. The drug is taken not for sensory gratification, but for immersion in a collective mental and spiritual world in which the participants become something more than human.
Between 1966 and 1969, the Austrian-born anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff made a series of field trips to study the use of hallucinogenic snuffs among the Tukano Indian groups in the Vaupés area of the Colombian Amazon. These groups have little in the way of social hierarchies, chiefs or councils of elders; conflicts are largely mediated by shamans, a category of adult males with specialist knowledge of plants, hunting or healing. The shamans’ activities are almost always conducted under the influence of a snuff prepared from the DMT-rich sap sweated out of the bark of various trees of the Virola genus. Powdered and propelled into the sinuses through a hollow stone or bone tube, the sap produces a state of heightened awareness in which diseases are treated and weather and game patterns predicted. But when large doses of snuff are taken, it is universally recognized among the Tukano that the shamans will turn into jaguars.
When Reichel-Dolmatoff attempted to establish precisely what this transformation entailed, he received a bewildering variety of explanations. The ‘jaguar complex’, as he termed it, operated across many levels of meaning. On one level, it described the physical sensations produced by the drug: snuffing produces a painful burning sensation followed by convulsive nausea, and shamans in the grip of these symptoms are said to be jaguars writhing and ‘turning their bellies up’. They were also consciously imitating jaguars: many shamans had personal collections of jaguar skin, claws and teeth. But they were also genuinely believed to be shifting form, taking on powers that make them capable of bloody acts of predation and revenge. It follows from this that a jaguar encountered in the wild may not truly be a jaguar, but rather a shaman in feline ‘dress’. Shamans acting in this way are able to enter the dreams of others in jaguar form. As they wander in the forest, their jaguar ‘dress’ can also guide them to the trails of ‘real’ jaguars, which they might witness, as some zoologists have, chewing on hallucinogenic vines and ‘turning their bellies up’ as the effects take hold.
On the surface, the transformation of shaman into jaguar seemed to be accepted as real by all Reichel-Dolmatoff’s subjects. Young men regaled him with bloodthirsty tales of rapes and murders that they had undertaken in feline form, often of friends or close kin; claw-marks and bloodstained whiskers were offered up as physical proof. But these terrifying tales tended to evaporate under scrutiny. The alleged victims were still alive and unharmed: the acts of violence seemed to have taken place in a parallel world. Indeed, Reichel-Dolmatoff’s informants acknowledged that ‘real’ jaguars are not particularly ferocious or dangerous, and are far more likely to flee from humans than to attack them. The shaman’s transformation into a jaguar was a symbolic theatre in which impulses of aggression and revenge could be acted out physically and tangibly, but without real-life consequences.
Yet the jaguar transformation was more than charade or a drug-induced fantasy. Under the influence of the snuff, shamans found themselves awakening into a state of hyper-consciousness in which they could see, hear, smell and understand aspects of reality normally hidden from view. The idea that they had transformed into jaguars made sense of these sensations: they were in possession of the uncanny night vision of the predator, its speed and agility, its preternaturally acute hearing. They were able to observe the world through new eyes, to receive unfamiliar impressions, and to expand the store of natural knowledge demanded by their role: the positions of the stars, the habits of other animals, the patterns of plant growth, the fluctuations of weather and climate, the hidden weave of nature itself. Used in this way, drugs can operate as a kind of sensory prosthetic: just as a diving suit allows humans temporary access to a normally hostile and alien world, Virola snuff allows the shaman to encompass a world populated by many different forms of consciousness and to glimpse a perspective beyond the limits of the human.
DRUGS AND CULTURE
Drugs can bestow remarkable powers, but only to those who are primed to receive them. The hallucinatory derangement of Virola snuff will overwhelm anyone who ingests enough of it, but for most it will be recalled (if at all) as a fever dream of fragmentary impressions, dominated by sensations of burning sinuses and overwhelming nausea. It is an intensely personal ordeal, but can only be understood within a social context. Unlike animal intoxication, human drug use is part of a web of verbal and symbolic culture, and it is here that its shared meanings reside.
In 1953 Howard S. Becker, a young sociologist and jazz enthusiast, published a now-classic paper entitled ‘Becoming a Marihuana User’. His musical interests had led him to study the lifestyles of New York’s jazz subculture, and he had focused on the practice of smoking cannabis, a habit widespread within his study group but regarded as deviant in the cultural mainstream. He began an informal project of interviewing users to understand how this practice was learned and transmitted.
What Becker discovered was a three-stage model that has since been applied to drug cultures across the world.
The first stage, ‘Learning the Technique’, involved the technical challenge of ingesting a sufficient dose of the drug – in this case, learning to inhale correctly, and to hold the smoke in the lungs for a sufficient length of time. But this was not enough to get high in and of itself: most first-time users felt no effects at all. A second stage, ‘Learning to Perceive the Effects’, was essential. This required the user to believe that there were indeed effects to be perceived, and to cultivate a gradual physical recognition of them: head-spinning, rubbery legs or hunger pangs. But even when perceived, it was not obvious to the user that these effects were desirable. The third stage, ‘Learning to Enjoy the Effects’, could only be grasped within a culture where the drug’s effects were valued: light-headedness was a cue for giggling and verbal flights of fancy, hunger pangs led to enjoyable snacking binges, feelings of anxiety or paranoia were acknowledged and soothed with camaraderie and humour.
Becker’s observations challenged the consensus view of 1950s American psychiatry that marijuana users represented a deviant and criminal minority whose aberrant appetites led them to drug use. It was, he argued, the opposite: they had joined a subculture within which drugs became pleasurable. ‘Marihuana use’, he concluded, ‘is a function of the individual’s conception of marihuana and of the uses to which it can be put’. People in straight society shunned marijuana not because they were virtuous, but because there was no reward to be gained from it: even if they felt the effects, they would lack the context in which to enjoy them.
The physical effects of most drugs are initially unpleasant, and would be perceived as toxic unless they were culturally valued, shared and sanctioned. The first glass of beer is unpleasantly sour; the first sip of red wine burns the mouth; the first lungful of tobacco produces coughing, low blood pressure and nausea. Modern drug cultures, by validating the exploration of unfamiliar tastes and mental states, have converted many substances from poison to exotic pleasure. ‘Magic’ mushrooms, for example, are now consumed with the expectation of a colourful and mind-expanding trip, but historical accounts of accidental ingestions show that, without such expectations, their effects were typically taken to be the painful and alarming onset of poisoning. The drug habits of one culture often disgust another, at least until the new drug is socialized and normalized: drugs may be universal, but they are also an acquired taste. Throughout history, the spread of foreign drugs has been socially divisive, eagerly adopted by some and fiercely resisted by others.
By Mike Jay in "High Society - Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture", Park Street Press, Rochester, USA, 2010. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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