While the “Yatrochemists” Paracelsus “religions” promoted the use of opium in Europe, the exotic newcomer slowly made his way onto the European scene. Tobacco was

By the time of contact with Europe, tobacco smoking was widespread in North America. Although the habit of consuming hallucinogenic, DMT-containing snuffs also prevailed in the

Any specific means introduced into use is inevitably accompanied by a multitude of charlatan medical theories and methods of treatment. Cocaine abuse, as we shall see,

In a commercial sense, tobacco did not reach its heights until the end of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). By that time, American colonies already existed

It was the prohibition of tobacco smoking in China, the last emperor of the Ming dynasty (1628–1644) that led upset tobacco followers to experiment with

At the beginning of the 19th century, opium influenced not only the policy of trading empires in the Far East, but also, quite unexpectedly, the

The analytical and psychological interest of people like De Quincey and the French psychiatrist J.-J. Moreau de Tours, and their relationship to the substances that

Morphine was isolated in 1805 by the young German chemist Friedrich Serturner. For Serturnera, morphine was the purest essence of a poppy plant. He gave