> It is not undoubtedly true that much medicine is based on religious superstition and racism (nor does the article linked here either make or justify that clai

> It is not undoubtedly true that much medicine is based on religious superstition and racism (nor does the article linked here either make or justify that claim). That's literally what the entire article is about... "How did our modern binary between ‘illicit drug’ and ‘valuable medicine’ come into being? Drugs have had a bad reputation since at least the time of Shakespeare, whose sleazy, potion-dispensing apothecary in Romeo and Juliet enables that play’s tragic finale. Shakespeare tended to associate drugs with things such as witches (‘mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected’) or Catholic assassins (‘drug-damn’d Italy’). But in the 17th century, drugs acquired associations with the non-European world: the fever-ridden islands of the Caribbean, tropical Africa, or the exoticised ‘East Indies’." "For Christian Europe, the medicinal virtues of foreign drugs such as coffee, tea, opium and cinchona (source of quinine) were counterbalanced by their origins in the lands of heathens." "The King of England himself joined a public chorus of voices attacking ‘Indies drugs’ as unhealthy and un-Christian. [...] James regarded smoking as a demonic custom from the shamanic cultures of the New World, evoking the ‘horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse’." "James wasn’t alone in demonising drugs. Inquisitors in Mexico City portrayed indigenous users of peyote as sorcerers, and Jesuit priests deep in the Amazon jungle sent back anxious reports about a plant called ayahuasca that allowed shamans to gather knowledge from evil spirits. Even the humble coffee bean provoked outraged diatribes about a ‘foreign liquor’ that had ‘bewitched’ consumers, causing enfeeblement, impotence, and worse. Psychoactive drugs thus stood at the centre of debates about imperialism, religion, and globalisation, as well as science. They still do." "Since at least the 1970s, practitioners of Western medicine have begun to pay greater heed to the flip side of their empirical tradition. Scientists have conducted experimental trials of tropical botanicals that colonial-era doctors dismissed as tools of witchcraft and 20th-century drug companies regarded as quackery."