Not many plants can claim such complex and closely intertwined relationships with people, such as opium poppy and tobacco. Both plants play a major role

What do we learn from comparing these two plants? Both have a long history of consumption, both contribute to addiction and are extremely destructive, and

Tobacco is a natural plant for the New World, and so is the custom of smoking plant materials to achieve the narcotic effects of them.

Poppy seeds are tasty and non-psychoactive food, as all lovers of buns with poppy seeds can confirm. But if an immature seed box is incised with

Only in Paracelsus, the famous father of chemotherapy, can we trace the revival of interest in opium. The great Swiss alchemist of the 16th century,

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