After Beyard Taylor, the next outstanding commentator in the field of hashish phenomena was the tireless Fitz Hugh Ludlow. This little-known bon vivant of the 19th century literature gave rise to the tradition of pharmaco-roguish literature, which later found followers in the person of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Ludlow, being a college freshman in 1855, decided to put on himself a scientific experiment on the effect of hashish during a student tea party.

I sat at the tea table when I was in awe. I passed Miss M.’s cup so that she filled it for me for the first time, and when she was about to return it to me, full to the brim with moisture, which invigorates but does not intoxicate, I, unwittingly, calculated the arc, by which her hand reaches me, having passed its way to my saucer. The wall was filled with dancing satires; Chinese mandarins idiot nodded in all corners, and I definitely felt the need to leave the table while I was still not posing.

There is in this report Ludlow about hemp a kind of wonderful quintessence of everything that was amusing for the yank-transcendentalists. Ludlow creates a literary character unlike the poet John Shade in Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, a hero who allows us to see the problem better than himself. Partly a genius, partly a madman, Ludlow is somewhere halfway between captain Ahab and P.-T. Barnum, this is something like Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm in his free spirit, pseudoscientific openness, when he follows his way through the shaky dunes of the world of hashish.

How much hashish sheds light on the deepest secrets of the mind? This is a question that will be dogmatically resolved in two diametrically opposite ways. A person who does not believe in anything that in no way would touch the organs of his body, will instinctively hide himself in the fortress of what he perceives as old common sense, and exclaim from there: “Insane!” He will reject every experience and the facts openly identified as true with the final and unquestioned verdict of abnormality.

And there are people of another class, whose representative, recognizing bodily sensations as very important in the nutrition and strengthening of the human body, is convinced that they give him only the appearance of something: not things as they are in essence and their laws, harmoniously correlated with its source, and only how they affect it through different parts of the body. This person will be inclined to believe that only Mind, with its prerogative of the only self-conscious being in the Universe, has the right and the ability to turn inward to itself for an answer to the amazing riddles of the world …

Arguing this way, a person, although he seems to be a dreamer, a visionary, recognizes the possibility of discovering from the Mind itself (in some of its over-ordinary awakened states) some truth or a set of truths that do not manifest themselves in the everyday state of this person.

The history of cannabis in the United States after Ludlow was at first happy. Consumption of cannabis is not stigmatized and not popularized. This situation lasted until the beginning of the 1930s, until the time when the campaign of Special Inspector of the USA on drugs Harry J. Enslinger did not give rise to general hysteria. Enslinger, apparently, largely acted by the will of the American chemical and petrochemical concerns interested in eliminating the competition of cannabis from the areas of production of lubricants, food, plastics and fibers.

Enslinger and the yellow press presented hemp as a “deadly potion”. William Randolph Hearst also popularized the term “marijuana” with a clear intention to associate it with the unreliable black part of the population. Nevertheless, it was extremely difficult for science to give an exact formulation of what its objections against the habit of cannabis are. The system of state financing of research actually certified one thing: “Caesar will hear only what is pleasing to Caesar.”

Despite all the pressure, hemp consumption has increased, so today hemp may well be the first most common agricultural product. America. This is one of the most enduring aspects of the great paradigm shift, which I call the “revival of the Archaic” here. It shows that the innate desire to restore psychological balance, which embodies the partnership society, is not easily restrained if it finds the right path. As for hemp, all that makes it hostile to the values ​​of modern bourgeois, just inspires love for the revival of the Archaic. It weakens the effect of the ego, has a mitigating effect on the need to compete, raises doubts about authority, and strengthens the understanding that social values ​​have only relative significance.

No remedy can compete with cannabis in its ability to satisfy the innate thirst for the dissolution of boundaries characteristic of the Archaic, and nevertheless leave intact the structures of ordinary society. If all alcoholics became users of marijuana, all “crack” consumers switched to marijuana, and all smokers smoked only hemp, then the social consequences of the “drug problem” would look completely different. But we, as a society, are not ready to discuss the possibility of directing our inclinations and using our mind to choose which plants to take as allies. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, it will come.

Long ago, in situations of depletion of resources and climate change, our ancestors — protohominides — learned to experience natural products of the environment for food. Modern primates (like baboons) still do that. They approach the unusual or unprecedented food source carefully, carefully study its appearance and smell, then put it in the mouth for the sample and hold it in the mouth without swallowing. After a few moments, the animal decides to either swallow the piece or spit it out. For many centuries, this procedure was repeated by man countless times during the establishment of his diet.

Obviously, it was necessary to come to a certain balance between the exclusion of food, which is deliberately unhealthy and reduces the reproductive capacity of the individual, and the inclusion of as many food sources as possible. The logic of evolution is adamant, and in situations of lack of food, those animals that are able and willing to accept more food options evolve more successfully than those that are able to include in their diet only a limited menu. In other words, this or that animal will be pressured to expand the range of usable food, expanding its tastes.

The expansion of tastes or the acquisition of taste is a process that is learned; This process has both psychological and biochemical components. The process of acquiring taste is extremely complicated. On the one hand, it entails overcoming the inertia of established habits, those habits that exclude a potentially new food unit, considering it exotic, unfamiliar, poisonous or somehow connected with enemies or outcasts of society. On the other hand, it includes adaptation to chemically unusual food. This process activates such involuntary systems of the body as, for example, the immune system; it also includes psychological mechanisms, such as, say, the desire to accept a new food for reasons that may be both social and related to its nutritional value. In the case of hallucinogenic plants, changes in the image of oneself and in one’s social roles, often following the establishment of the acceptability of these plants, are very quick and serious. But let’s not forget that hallucinogens are located on the very edge of the food scale.

What can be said about the innumerable multitude of plants that give food flavor, but represent insignificant nutritional value and have negligible psychoactivity? They had the opportunity to become those food units that people used constantly. In fact, they have gone from being an exotic luxury for the few idle class of the Roman Empire, to becoming commercial goods, which directed the immense efforts of Europeans to explore and colonize new lands and start the car of the merchants and the creation of empires that replaced the stagnation Middle Ages in Christian Europe, fixated on intra-social issues.

“Variety gives a taste of life,” says the famous maxim. But after studying the influence of plants and plant products on the history of mankind, it would be more correct to say: “Taste gives life a variety”. The Middle Ages – and their ending – is just such a case.

The culture of dominion has never been so strongly protected as in Christian Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire. And, it seems, it is possible to say with certainty that hardly ever did the people stay in such a protracted situation of the paucity of psychoactive drugs and the absence of chemical stimulants. Diversity that promotes learning and boredom has been absent from Europe for too long.

Medieval Europe was one of the most closed, neurotic and hating women from all societies that had ever existed. It was a society dying to escape from itself, a society obsessed with too harsh morality and the suppression of sexuality.

It was a landbound society, ruled by meat-eating gouty, wearing clothes and suppressing women. And is there anything strange in the fact that dyes and spices — perhaps the cause of social revolutions — have become the point of some absolute mania in medieval Europe? And the strength of this mania was such that the art of shipbuilding and navigation, the banking and trading industry turned entirely to the ministry of addiction to these things, experienced by most Europeans. Spices (as a new taste) gave food and, consequently, life, a variety previously unknown. Dyes, new dyeing techniques and exotic fabrics have revolutionized fashion.

Most people who were born in a society of abundance, sense gratification and television with high quality images, it is difficult to imagine the senseless stupidity of most of the societies of the past. All the “pomp” of the great societies of the past was, in essence, simply a demonstration of diversity – diversity in color, in fabrics, in materials and in external design. Such demonstrations of diversity were the exclusive prerogative of the ruler and the court. The novelty of the costumes and the new posts at the court were in some way indicative of his power. So it was when the emerging bourgeoisie of the late Middle Ages began importing dyes and spices, silk and manufactory items to Europe.

I can personally witness the power of the influence of color and diversity on human imagination. The periods of isolation in the jungle during field work in the upper reaches of the Amazon taught me to understand how quickly the disorderly diversity of civilized life can be forgotten and then cause thirst similar to the one that occurs when you deprive of some strong drug. After several weeks spent in the jungle, the mind becomes crammed with plans about what restaurants you will visit, returning to civilization, what music you will listen to, what movies you will watch. One day, after spending many days in the rain forest in the rain, I went to one village to ask the residents for permission to collect a collection of plants in the area of ​​their tribe.The only impregnation of “high technology” in the primitive setting of the tribe was a calendar with images of naked women brought from Iquitos and proudly decorated the reed wall just behind the head of the village. When I talked to him, my eyes turned again and again to this calendar, not to its content, but to its colors. Red, bluish, apricot – an eerie and obsessive attraction to diversity was as irresistible as the lure of any drug!

The dyes and spices of the more technically advanced and more aesthetically refined world of Islam entered the bloodstream of gloomy Christian Europe with the power of a hallucinogenic substance. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, its dried husks and cardamom, dozens of other exotic spices, aromatic substances and dyes appeared to broaden the taste and wardrobe of beer and bread culture wrapped in wool. Our own culture in the past few years has witnessed a similar, albeit more superficial trend in the emergence of “yuppie” fashion – fashion for novelty and for new exotic restaurants: from national to ultramodern, super modern.

At school we were taught that the spice trade ended the Middle Ages and created the basis of modern commerce and commerce, but we did not get an understanding of the fact that the decay of Christian medieval Europe was a consequence of the epidemic obsession with new, exotic and pleasant – in short, mind-expanding substances. Means such as coffee, wormwood, as well as opium, dyes, silks, rare species of trees, jewels and even people, were brought to Europe and demonstrated almost like prey taken from some extraterrestrial civilization. This idea of ​​the splendor of the East – with its luxury, sensuality and unexpected compositional motifs – acted in changing not only aesthetic norms, but also the canons of social behavior and a person’s own image. The names of the cities of the Silk Road – Samarkand,Ecbatana – have become a kind of mantra, marking the worlds of refinement and luxury, previously associated only with Paradise. Social boundaries dissolved; old problems began to be seen in a new light; new secular classes arose, challenging the monogamy of the popes and kings.

In short, there was a sudden acceleration of the emergence of novelty and the emergence of new social forms — the control traces of a kind of quantum leap — in the ability of European imagination. And again, the search for plants and the mental stimulation caused by them inspired a certain part of humanity to experiment with new social forms, new technologies, as well as to super-fast expansion of the limits of language and imagination. The pressure on the development of the spice trade literally reformed the art of navigation, shipbuilding, diplomacy, military art, restructured geography and economic planning. And again the unconscious desire to imitate and, thus,partial restoration of lost symbiosis

When the thirst for diversity was quenched by a massive and continuous import of spices, dyes and aromatic substances, the resulting infrastructure focused on other aspirations for diversity, especially the production and export of sugar, chocolate, tea and coffee, as well as purified alcohol – psychoactive products properties. Our present-day planetary trading system was created to satisfy people’s inherent need for diversity and stimulation: This was done with purposeful intensity, which tolerated no interference from the church or the state. Neither moral doubts nor physical barriers were able to stand in this way. Now we can seem to ourselves to be exceptionally well settled – now any “spice”, any psychoactive substance,however limited its traditional consumption zone may be, it can be identified and then produced or synthesized for speedy export and sale in the needy market anywhere in the world.

Now global pandemics of adherence to a particular substance have become possible. The import of tobacco smoking in Europe in the 16th century was the first and most obvious example. It was followed by many others – from the increased spread of opium consumption in China among the British, through the opium fashion in England in the 18th century, and to the spread of the habit of distilled alcohol among North American Indian tribes.

Of the many new products that made their way to Europe during the collapse of medieval stagnation, one stands out in particular as a product with a new taste, as a chosen substance. This is cane sugar. Sugar has been known for centuries as a rare medical substance. The Romans knew that it could be extracted from bamboo-like grass. But the tropical conditions necessary for the cultivation of sugarcane were a guarantee that sugar would be a rare and imported commodity in Europe. Only in the XIX century on the initiative of Napoleon I began to grow sugar beet as an alternative to cane sugar.

Sugar cane is known to be found in the wild, and this plant is well represented in tropical Asia. At least five species grow in India. Sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum) has undoubtedly undergone significant hybridization throughout its long history of domestication. The Persian king Khosrov (AD 531-578), whose court was near Jandi-Shapur, sent envoys to India to study the rumors about exotic substances.

Among them (of these substances) Sukkar (Pers. “ Shakar” ” or “ shakkar ”, Skt. “ Sarkara ” ) was brought to Jandi-Shapur from India , our “ sugar ”, unknown to Herodotus and Ctesias, but known to Nearchus and Onesikrita as “reed honey”, which supposedly is made by rees by bees. The legend tells that Khosrow found a whole warehouse of sugar among the treasures captured in the year 527 when conquering Dastigrid. In India, cane juice was cleaned and turned into sugar around 300 g. e., and now this reed began to be cultivated near Jandi-Shapur, where sugar mills were known for a long time. Then, and even after a long time, sugar was used only to sweeten bitter medicines, and only much later did he begin to replace honey as usual sweetness.

Sugar came to England around 1319, and became popular in Sweden by 1390. It was an expensive and exotic novelty, mostly speaking in its traditional medical role: sugar made acceptable a very unpleasant taste mixture – a mixture of medicinal herbs, animal entrails and other components, typical of the medieval Pharmacopoeia. Before the discovery of antibiotics, it was decided to sprinkle wounds on them before bandaging them, since the drying effect of sugar might have helped the treatment.

The Spaniards grew sugar cane in their possessions in the Caribbean, and they could claim the dubious honor of bringing slaves into the New World to produce sugar.

Until 1550, all sugar imported from the Western Hemisphere consisted of literally several heads, delivered as evidence of the possibility of its production, or simply as a curiosity. Plantations in the western islands of the Atlantic and in the New World had no effect on sugar production, its distribution and prices until the second half of the 16th century and gained dominant influence only sometime since 1650.

Isn’t it a stretch to discuss sugar in the context of human consumption of psychoactive substances? Far from it. Sugar abuse is the least discussed habit in the world and the most common. And this is one of the hardest habits of artificial pleasure. Sugar lovers may stick to constant consumption in moderation, or they may be such that they eat up to the heap. Examples of the seriousness of addiction to sugar are subjects who are able to absorb excess sugar-rich food, and then induce vomiting or use laxatives to allow themselves to eat more sugar. Imagine what would happen if such a practice was associated with heroin. How much more odious and insidious would then be his consumption! As with all stimulants, sugar intake is accompanied by short euphoria,followed by depression and guilt. As a syndrome, sugar addiction is rarely found in isolation. The most common addictions of mixed type – for example, sugar and caffeine.

There are other examples of the purely narcotic consumption destructive effects that accompany sugar abuse. Some of his followers use food pills to control their increasing weight, and then tranquilizers to soothe the nervous irritation caused by the pills. Sugar abuse is often associated with the occurrence of serious alcohol abuse; The unconditional relationship between high sugar consumption and high alcohol consumption without snacks has been proven. After alcohol and tobacco, sugar is the most harmful of the addictive substances that a person consumes. Its uncontrolled consumption can lead to serious chemical dependence.

Describing sugar followers, Janice Phelps states.

The breaking and dehumanization of human institutions and human lives, now triggered by crack cocaine, is nothing compared to what European passion for sugar did in the 17th — 18th centuries. Some may say that the initial stages of cocaine production is characterized by something like slave, bonded labor. The only difference is that this is not slavery, which is sanctioned by deceitful priests and is openly recognized as corrupt, although legitimate, governments. Another point should be noted: modern drug trafficking, no matter how disgusting it may be, has nothing to do with abduction of children, their export and the destruction of entire populations, as was done in order to increase sugar production.

True, the roots of slavery in Europe stretch far inland. In the Golden Age of Athens since the time of Pericles, as many as two thirds of the city’s permanent residents were slaves; in Italy since the time of Julius Caesar, probably half the population was slaves. Under the rule of the Roman Empire, slavery became increasingly unbearable:

slaves had no civil rights, and in court proceedings their testimony was taken into account only if it was obtained under torture. If the slave owner died suddenly or under suspicious circumstances, then all his slaves, both those guilty and those not guilty, were immediately put to death. It is fair to say that this pillar of the empire on the institution of slavery should temper our reverence for Ancient Rome, which we may have experienced. In truth, his greatness was the greatness of a pigsty, disguised as a military brothel.

Slavery died away with the collapse of the empire, when all social institutions dissolved in the chaos of the beginning of the dark ages. Feudalism replaced slavery with serfdom. Serfdom was, to some extent, better slavery: a serf could at least have his own home, start a family, farm and take part in the life of the community. And most importantly, perhaps, in the fact that the serf could not be removed from the ground. When they sold the land, the serfs almost always went with it.

In 1432, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator, who was more a manager and an entrepreneur than a researcher, founded the first commercial sugarcane plantation in Madeira. Sugar cane plantations were created in the other eastern Atlantic possessions of Portugal more than 60 years before communication with the New World was established. Over a thousand people, among them insolvent debtors, convicts, unconverted Jews, were brought from Europe to sugar works. Their position was semi-Arabic – akin to a contingent of “penalty box” and employees who settled in Australia and some of the mid-Atlantic American colonies.

In his book , The Seeds of Change, Henry Hobhauz writes about the beginning of the enslavement of Africa. In 1443, one of the captains of Prince Henry, who returned to their homeland, brought news of the seizure of a crew of black Arabs and Muslims to the sea.

These people, who were of mixed Arabian-Negro origin and professed Islam, said that they were of a proud race and were not suitable slaves. They argued that in the depths of Africa there are many healthy black, children of Ham, who become excellent slaves and whom they can turn into slavery in exchange for their freedom. Thus began the modern slave trade – not yet the transatlantic, but its prior trade between Africa and southern Europe.

Next, Hobhouse describes slavery related to sugar production in the New World.

“Sugar” slavery is of a completely different kind. This was the first since the days of the Roman latifundia large-scale use of slaves for growing crops for sale (not for food). And also for the first time in history, one single race was chosen for the role of slaves. Spain and Portugal themselves abandoned the enslavement of the population in the East Indies, from the fact that the Chinese slaves, the Japanese or the Europeans worked in both Americas.

The slave trade itself was a kind of pernicious addiction. The initial importation of African slaves for servitude to labor in the New World was pursued only by one goal — the maintenance of an agricultural economy based on sugar. Sugar fashion was so tenacious that the millennial treatment of people with Christian ethics did not lead to anything. It was an explosion of human cruelty and atrocities of unbelievable proportions, which were encouraged by sophisticated society.

Let it be perfectly clear to us that sugar is absolutely not needed for human nutrition; before the advent of industrial cane and beet sugar, humanity completely did without refined sugar, which is almost pure sucrose. Sugar does not give anything that could not be obtained from some other, easily accessible source. This is just a light stimulant, and nothing more. And for his sake, the European culture of dominion was ready to change the ideals of the Enlightenment by its collusion with slave traders. In 1800, virtually every ton of sugar imported into England was produced by slave labor. The ability of an ego-dominated culture to silence such a truth is simply amazing.

If it seems to someone that too much anger is poured on sugar addiction, it is only from the fact that addiction to it in many respects seems to be a kind of mixture of all the erroneous positions that are inherent in our opinion regarding narcotic drugs.

In the opening lines of his magnificent poem “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens conveys the image of radiant transcendence, as well as the familiar and usual dignity of Cezanne.

The satisfaction of the peignoir, and the late Coffee and oranges in the golden chair from the sun, And the green privilege of the cockatoo Mingle on the rug to dispel the Holy Quiet of the old victim.

Stevens strings evoke the atmosphere of secular satiety surrounding a caffeine drink. “Sunny Morning” reminds us that our stereotypical notion of what drugs are is changing when we are asked to consider such refined accessories of bourgeois taste as tea, coffee and cocoa, as belonging to the same category as heroin and cocaine. Nevertheless, all this is drugs; our unconscious desire to once again find the path to the sensory characteristics of prehistory led us to create innumerable options to pay tribute to the psychoactivity relying on a vegetable base. Light stimulants with harmless and controlled action were included in the food of primates long before the occurrence of hominids. Caffeine is an alkaloid that underlies many of the things that are associated with plant stimulants in humans.Caffeine is a powerful stimulant in a dose much lower than a toxic one. It is found in tea and coffee and in many other plants, such as Ilex paraguayensis – the source of the Paraguayan tea mate or Paullinia yoco – the appetite suppressing Amazonian vine, which has its own local, but ancient and high-standard style of consumption.

Caffeine is bitter in itself, and the discovery to make it more palatable by adding honey or sugar has created the basis for a widespread and little-noted synergistic effect that exists between sugar and various caffeine drinks. The tendency of sugar to cause addiction increases if it is used to improve the taste of a stimulating alkaloid, such as caffeine.

Sugar we attributed to the number of foods. This implies that he cannot act as a drug of great addiction, and yet there is evidence around us. Many sugar-abusing people are in a sugar-conditioned atmosphere, characterized primarily by mood swings.

For purely practical purposes, we can say that tea, coffee and cocoa were brought to England at the same time in 1650. For the first time in its history, Christian Europe has found an alternative to alcohol. All three imported products are stimulants, all are brewed with hot boiled water, which freed the then serious problems of water-borne diseases; and all three require copious amounts of sugar. Sugar fad contributed to the consumption of coffee, tea and chocolate, which in turn contributed to the consumption of sugar. And the popularity of new stimulants increased in the same colonies, which proved to be very profitable due to the production of sugar in them. Tea, coffee and cocoa offered the possibility of changing crops cultivated in the colonies, and consequently, greater economic stability for both the colonies and the metropolis.

By 1820, thousands of tons of tea were imported to Europe annually (plus about another 30 million pounds consumed by the United Kingdom alone). Tea for the European market from the middle of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century was supplied from the Chinese seaside city of Canton. Tea purchasers were not allowed to penetrate inland, they were not devoted to any details of the cultivation and cultivation of this plant. According to Hobhouse, “all the historical humor about Europe is that for almost two centuries the goods were imported from a distance of half the world and that a huge industry has grown that includes 5% of all large-scale domestic production, but none the less knew anything about how to grow, make or mix tea. ”

Ignorance was not a barrier to the commercial exploitation of tea; but the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 was such a barrier. When the trade routes through the Eastern Mediterranean were in the hands of the Turks, the art of navigation and shipbuilding began to be subjected to considerable pressure in order to ease the way through the ocean to the East through the Cape of Good Hope. This path was opened in 1498 by Vasco da Gama.

When the Danish and Portuguese navigators finally reached the Molukki in Eastern Indonesia, then called the Spice Islands, spices became much cheaper in Europe, and the struggle for the creation of monopolies ensued among all parties. The type of organization most suitable for preserving the monopoly was a trading company – a group of traders who rallied to reduce the risk of investment and competition. Large, well-armed ships of various East India companies put an end to the era of captain merchants serving their own enterprise. The British East India Company, which was destined to become the most significant of the trading companies, was founded in 1600.

From that moment until 1834, when free trade liberals opened the tea trade to all interested parties, the company controlled the tea trade with tremendous benefits for it.

The British East Indies Company is believed to have charged at least a third of the price of tea, thus obtaining £ 100 per tonne of the 375,000 tons it imported during the eighteenth century. Behind this impressive figure is the increase in income of the East India Company from $ 17 million at the beginning of the century to an annual equivalent of $ 800 million in 1800. The East India Company was a powerful corporation, hated by both smugglers and consumers alike, a symbol of a selling and self-satisfied monopoly.