7 ms·

The failed globalization of psychedelic drugs in the early modern world

128 points by benbreen 5y ago

benbreen 5y ago
Author here: this is an open-access journal article, mostly about the colonial histories of peyote, psilocybin and ayahuasca. If you aren't able to access it and want to, just get in touch (contact info in profile) and I'd be happy to email you a PDF. Same goes with the primary sources I cite, although most should be available via Hathi Trust's emergency temporary access feature.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
  Great article - it would make sense to me that these substances were, as you said 'in-ward facing', not something you hand out to foreign visitors but something you guard as a sacred secret. I would imagine these societies would also guard many of these practices locally, regionally. Makes me all the more grateful, thanks.
- Dylovell 5y ago
  Thank you for making this open to the public, and thank you for your work.
  - benbreen 5y ago
    Thanks! Though I have to say, credit for the open access is entirely due to librarians of the UC system. I just had to click a button saying I wanted it to be made available. The work was already done via this 2019 agreement with Cambridge: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/cambridge-transformative-oa-agreement/ https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relation...
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Laymen here, I was surprised that opium didn't get more than a passing mention. It seems to have made some inroads a 150 or years ago.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I believe because opium isn't a psychedelic.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Opium is psychoactive, but not a psychedelic.
- lurquer 5y ago
  Very interesting and well-written. Thanks.
tejohnso 5y ago
> ...made it difficult for them to follow the same paths as commodified drugs like cacao or tobacco. This is the first I've heard of cacao being referred to as a drug. Is this the same cacao used in the production of chocolate?
- sharklazer 5y ago
  Yes. And yeah it is. It contains similar alkaloids to coffee beans. Moderns process often see these removed. Pharmacopeia is strange.
- woile 5y ago
  I know it's used as part of some rituals, usually before taking mushrooms. You take a shot in the nose. But I don't know what are the effects. Some people just cry or connect with emotions, but this is anecdotal.
  - Ccecil 5y ago
    From what I have read Cacao is a MAO inhibitor. Reports from users mixing it with mushrooms state that it increases the effect [1][2] [1] https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/4838011 https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/4838011 [2] https://psychedelictimes.com/potentiating-psilocybin-entourage-effect/ https://psychedelictimes.com/potentiating-psilocybin-entoura...
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  Chocolate contains theobromine and caffeine. The Theobromine is why you shouldn't feed dogs chocolate.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  I have some ceremonial cacao. A ceremonial portion of 45 grams (made into hot chocolate) produces a light euphoric glow for a while. It's in the same ballpark as tea, peppermint, etc. - a very tame, mild, natural "high". Similar to brewing a few fresh cannabis leaves. Nice but barely noticeable.
lucioperca 5y ago
Hmm, lets see. Tobacco is highly addictive, while these mentioned drugs are not. Could it be, that you create lasting demand for addictive drugs very easily?
- rubyfan 5y ago
  I think that combined with immediate side effects. It’s probably socially acceptable in just about every culture to be buzzed (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaf) but way less tolerable to be walking around doped up or hallucinating, throwing up as part of the experience or generally needing a baby sitter.
  - lurquer 5y ago
    > caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaf You may have missed his point. The four you mentioned are highly addictive. You crave them after a relatively short period of use. An addictive substance — regardless of what it does or doesn’t do — will have a leg-up in the marketplace.
    - fourier456 5y ago
      Maybe not? It’s a reasonable alternative explanation. Both seem to be viable. A substance that doesn’t incapacitate you - regardless of what it does or doesn’t do - will have a leg-up in the marketplace.
      - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
        Alcohol and cocaine don't incapacitate you? Millions of drunks who completely pass out regularly might disagree. I have heard of people claiming that psychedelics enhance their senses and there are professional surfers who have talked about taking LSD to improve their performance. Never heard of anyone doping with alcohol, though. Your comment made me curious and I did look it up: There are four sports that used to or still do test for alcohol as a banned substance in competitions. They are archery, air sports, motor racing and powerboating. It's easy to guess why.
wyldfire 5y ago
I followed one of the citations to this article "Constructing drug effects: A history of set and setting" [1]. A very interesting read, excerpts below: > LSD research of the 1950s was dominated by the idea that the drug could be used to induce and study mental illness ... Presupposing that patients become mentally ill under the effects of LSD, they were creating expectancies ... the subjects who participated in research were hospitalized psychiatric patients who had little choice about partaking in experiments. Preparation for sessions was poor, often consisting of the casual suggestion that the patient will experience a few hours of madness following the ingestion of the drug, not a soothing notion, to say the least. > And yet, as the 1950s progressed a growing number of publications were describing the LSD experience in radically different terms. ... participants in psychotherapeutically oriented LSD research asked to repeat the experience time and again (Abramson, 1960). The striking differences in the description of the effects of LSD can readily be explained by the striking differences in the set and setting which existed between the two schools of research. ... > Yet by the 1970s, following the abandonment of psychedelic drug research and the classification of psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, the concept of set and setting would all but disappear from the literature. ... > Numerous experiments conducted under strictly controlled conditions (double-blind, with placebos) on a wide range of subjects and in different cultures have demonstrated that both mood and actions are affected far more by what people think they have drunk than by what they have actually drunk ... people who expect drinking to result in violence become aggressive; those who expect it to make them feel sexy become amorous; those who view it as disinhibiting are demonstrative. ... > Over the last decades, principles of set and setting have been employed both as drug policy measures as well as by local and community initiatives in order to reduce the drug harms. Prominent examples include the case of Dutch coffee shops, as well as chill out rooms and free availability of water in clubs where MDMA is commonly used. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325
- benbreen 5y ago
  I agree, that story is fascinating. In fact the shift in the 1950s in how scientists thought about psychedelics is actually what my second book (in progress) is about. The Abramson cited in that study is one of the main people I've been researching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Alexander_Abramson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Alexander_Abramson So as a follow on, I know this is a long shot but if anyone reading this has family or professional connections to some of the people involved in that first generation of psychedelic research in the 1950s and early 1960s (yes, they are old now, but at least a few are still around) please get in touch with me. I've been conducting oral history interviews for the past year or two and finding out all kinds of interesting things.
twic 5y ago
> Why did some drugs, like tobacco, move readily across cultural and geographic barriers in the early modern era, while others, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms, remained confined to specific regions? One thing that's interesting to me is that psilocybin mushrooms were already widely distributed. Hallucinogenic mushrooms grow everywhere, including in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom#Occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom#Occurrence The mushrooms you might pick or buy in Europe today are, AFAIK, those European varieties, not imported American ones. But we don't have a widespread tradition of using these mushrooms in Western Europe, do we? If you read Aristophanes, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, there are people getting drunk all over the place, but nobody ever shrooms. The Sami famously use fly agaric in rituals (concentrating it in human or reindeer urine). Apparently, so do other Siberian peoples. The people we now think of as the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from Siberians who crossed the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago. Perhaps they took the tradition with them? Europeans have known about the Sami use of mushrooms for a long time. Finns protected the Sami from Christian missionaries, because they valued their shamanic powers. Lithuanians exported mushrooms to the Sami: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Psychoactive_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Psychoactive_... And (further down the above page), scholars knew about magic mushrooms in the 18th century. But somehow, the magic mushroom has had no deep impact on European society. Or maybe it has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cr... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/opinion/santa-christmas-mushrooms.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/opinion/santa-christmas-m...
- benbreen 5y ago
  I've often wondered about why psilocybin-bearing mushrooms are so widely distributed but had such localized cultural impacts. I don't have a good answer to that one and am still thinking it through. I will note though that terms like "magic mushroom" can be confusing in that they lump together Amanita mascaria with psilocybin mushrooms. The effects are totally different on a pharmacological level. I don't see any reason to posit a direct link between cultures using amanita and those using psilocybin. That said, there are some interesting clues about shamanistic practices being shared across Central Asia and indigenous cultures of the Americas, especially if the Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené–Yeniseian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené–Yeniseian_languages A fun book that touches, speculatively, on the legacy of Central Asian shamanism as a common thread even in medieval and early modern Europe is Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles
dcolkitt 5y ago
I would suggest that psychedelics saw a mass market breakthrough after LSD for the same reason that smartphones saw a breakthrough after the release of the iPhone. Sure the product category existed prior to then. But the new version was such a step up in user experience that it turned a niche product into a mass market.

128 points by benbreen 5y ago

Author here: this is an open-access journal article, mostly about the colonial histories of peyote, psilocybin and ayahuasca. If you aren't able to access it and want to, just get in touch (contact info in profile) and I'd be happy to email you a PDF. Same goes with the primary sources I cite, although most should be available via Hathi Trust's emergency temporary access feature.

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
Great article - it would make sense to me that these substances were, as you said 'in-ward facing', not something you hand out to foreign visitors but something you guard as a sacred secret. I would imagine these societies would also guard many of these practices locally, regionally. Makes me all the more grateful, thanks.
Dylovell 5y ago
Thank you for making this open to the public, and thank you for your work.
- benbreen 5y ago
  Thanks! Though I have to say, credit for the open access is entirely due to librarians of the UC system. I just had to click a button saying I wanted it to be made available. The work was already done via this 2019 agreement with Cambridge: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/cambridge-transformative-oa-agreement/ https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relation...
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Laymen here, I was surprised that opium didn't get more than a passing mention. It seems to have made some inroads a 150 or years ago.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I believe because opium isn't a psychedelic.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Opium is psychoactive, but not a psychedelic.
lurquer 5y ago
Very interesting and well-written. Thanks.

tejohnso 5y ago

> ...made it difficult for them to follow the same paths as commodified drugs like cacao or tobacco. This is the first I've heard of cacao being referred to as a drug. Is this the same cacao used in the production of chocolate?

sharklazer 5y ago
Yes. And yeah it is. It contains similar alkaloids to coffee beans. Moderns process often see these removed. Pharmacopeia is strange.
woile 5y ago
I know it's used as part of some rituals, usually before taking mushrooms. You take a shot in the nose. But I don't know what are the effects. Some people just cry or connect with emotions, but this is anecdotal.
- Ccecil 5y ago
  From what I have read Cacao is a MAO inhibitor. Reports from users mixing it with mushrooms state that it increases the effect [1][2] [1] https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/4838011 https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/4838011 [2] https://psychedelictimes.com/potentiating-psilocybin-entourage-effect/ https://psychedelictimes.com/potentiating-psilocybin-entoura...
EamonnMR 5y ago
Chocolate contains theobromine and caffeine. The Theobromine is why you shouldn't feed dogs chocolate.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
I have some ceremonial cacao. A ceremonial portion of 45 grams (made into hot chocolate) produces a light euphoric glow for a while. It's in the same ballpark as tea, peppermint, etc. - a very tame, mild, natural "high". Similar to brewing a few fresh cannabis leaves. Nice but barely noticeable.

lucioperca 5y ago

Hmm, lets see. Tobacco is highly addictive, while these mentioned drugs are not. Could it be, that you create lasting demand for addictive drugs very easily?

rubyfan 5y ago
I think that combined with immediate side effects. It’s probably socially acceptable in just about every culture to be buzzed (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaf) but way less tolerable to be walking around doped up or hallucinating, throwing up as part of the experience or generally needing a baby sitter.
- lurquer 5y ago
  > caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, coca leaf You may have missed his point. The four you mentioned are highly addictive. You crave them after a relatively short period of use. An addictive substance — regardless of what it does or doesn’t do — will have a leg-up in the marketplace.
  - fourier456 5y ago
    Maybe not? It’s a reasonable alternative explanation. Both seem to be viable. A substance that doesn’t incapacitate you - regardless of what it does or doesn’t do - will have a leg-up in the marketplace.
    - trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      Alcohol and cocaine don't incapacitate you? Millions of drunks who completely pass out regularly might disagree. I have heard of people claiming that psychedelics enhance their senses and there are professional surfers who have talked about taking LSD to improve their performance. Never heard of anyone doping with alcohol, though. Your comment made me curious and I did look it up: There are four sports that used to or still do test for alcohol as a banned substance in competitions. They are archery, air sports, motor racing and powerboating. It's easy to guess why.

wyldfire 5y ago

I followed one of the citations to this article "Constructing drug effects: A history of set and setting" [1]. A very interesting read, excerpts below: > LSD research of the 1950s was dominated by the idea that the drug could be used to induce and study mental illness ... Presupposing that patients become mentally ill under the effects of LSD, they were creating expectancies ... the subjects who participated in research were hospitalized psychiatric patients who had little choice about partaking in experiments. Preparation for sessions was poor, often consisting of the casual suggestion that the patient will experience a few hours of madness following the ingestion of the drug, not a soothing notion, to say the least. > And yet, as the 1950s progressed a growing number of publications were describing the LSD experience in radically different terms. ... participants in psychotherapeutically oriented LSD research asked to repeat the experience time and again (Abramson, 1960). The striking differences in the description of the effects of LSD can readily be explained by the striking differences in the set and setting which existed between the two schools of research. ... > Yet by the 1970s, following the abandonment of psychedelic drug research and the classification of psychedelics as Schedule I drugs, the concept of set and setting would all but disappear from the literature. ... > Numerous experiments conducted under strictly controlled conditions (double-blind, with placebos) on a wide range of subjects and in different cultures have demonstrated that both mood and actions are affected far more by what people think they have drunk than by what they have actually drunk ... people who expect drinking to result in violence become aggressive; those who expect it to make them feel sexy become amorous; those who view it as disinhibiting are demonstrative. ... > Over the last decades, principles of set and setting have been employed both as drug policy measures as well as by local and community initiatives in order to reduce the drug harms. Prominent examples include the case of Dutch coffee shops, as well as chill out rooms and free availability of water in clubs where MDMA is commonly used. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325

benbreen 5y ago
I agree, that story is fascinating. In fact the shift in the 1950s in how scientists thought about psychedelics is actually what my second book (in progress) is about. The Abramson cited in that study is one of the main people I've been researching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Alexander_Abramson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Alexander_Abramson So as a follow on, I know this is a long shot but if anyone reading this has family or professional connections to some of the people involved in that first generation of psychedelic research in the 1950s and early 1960s (yes, they are old now, but at least a few are still around) please get in touch with me. I've been conducting oral history interviews for the past year or two and finding out all kinds of interesting things.

twic 5y ago

> Why did some drugs, like tobacco, move readily across cultural and geographic barriers in the early modern era, while others, such as peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms, remained confined to specific regions? One thing that's interesting to me is that psilocybin mushrooms were already widely distributed. Hallucinogenic mushrooms grow everywhere, including in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom#Occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom#Occurrence The mushrooms you might pick or buy in Europe today are, AFAIK, those European varieties, not imported American ones. But we don't have a widespread tradition of using these mushrooms in Western Europe, do we? If you read Aristophanes, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, there are people getting drunk all over the place, but nobody ever shrooms. The Sami famously use fly agaric in rituals (concentrating it in human or reindeer urine). Apparently, so do other Siberian peoples. The people we now think of as the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from Siberians who crossed the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago. Perhaps they took the tradition with them? Europeans have known about the Sami use of mushrooms for a long time. Finns protected the Sami from Christian missionaries, because they valued their shamanic powers. Lithuanians exported mushrooms to the Sami: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Psychoactive_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Psychoactive_... And (further down the above page), scholars knew about magic mushrooms in the 18th century. But somehow, the magic mushroom has had no deep impact on European society. Or maybe it has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cr... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/opinion/santa-christmas-mushrooms.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/opinion/santa-christmas-m...

benbreen 5y ago
I've often wondered about why psilocybin-bearing mushrooms are so widely distributed but had such localized cultural impacts. I don't have a good answer to that one and am still thinking it through. I will note though that terms like "magic mushroom" can be confusing in that they lump together Amanita mascaria with psilocybin mushrooms. The effects are totally different on a pharmacological level. I don't see any reason to posit a direct link between cultures using amanita and those using psilocybin. That said, there are some interesting clues about shamanistic practices being shared across Central Asia and indigenous cultures of the Americas, especially if the Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené–Yeniseian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené–Yeniseian_languages A fun book that touches, speculatively, on the legacy of Central Asian shamanism as a common thread even in medieval and early modern Europe is Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles

dcolkitt 5y ago

I would suggest that psychedelics saw a mass market breakthrough after LSD for the same reason that smartphones saw a breakthrough after the release of the iPhone. Sure the product category existed prior to then. But the new version was such a step up in user experience that it turned a niche product into a mass market.