At the end of the 18th century, the tea trade experienced a crisis, and the government of Lord North made a series of ill-considered decisions that led not only to the collapse of the tea trade, but also to the loss by England of its colonies in North America. North’s strategy was to sell tea at reduced prices in the colonies, thus reducing surpluses and squeezing out the smuggling competitors from the business. He also tried to impose a small and, as he thought, insignificant tax on tea going to the colonies, just to make the recalcitrant colonists submit to the power of the empire. It is well known that this tax was the last one that broke the cup of patience with a drop in the political incitement of the American colonies. On December 16, 1773, the enraged colonial radicals in Boston turned His Majesty’s tea ships back, destroying their cargo. That night was, so to speak,brewed tea revolution. And there were other “tea” – in New York, Charleston, Savannah and Philadelphia. The case could have subsided in a few weeks, if the British closing the Boston port in response did not inevitably make the Declaration of Independence.

By the beginning of the XIX century, the tea trade showed clear signs of instability. On the European continent, the Napoleonic wars devastated the treasury. The answer was printing paper money that was not backed by gold, and this practice eventually led to serious inflation: retail prices rose, the cost of products grew much slower, which led to a decline in the economy. The panacea for this economic deadlock was opium.

The trade in opium was nothing more than British terrorism directed against the population of China, until the restrictions imposed by the Chinese government on the import of opium did not put an end to this. In these events, as if laid the scheme, repeated in our century. As tea distributors turned to opium when their tea market was depressed, Western intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the French secret service, turned their attention to cocaine imports in the eighties after losing an almost complete monopoly on heroin selling this drug to mullahs Iranian revolution. The history of this kind of commercial synergy of drugs, when one drug is cynically promoted and used to support the introduction of others over the past 500 years, is not very pleasant to consider. May be,that is why such an activity is taken quite rarely.

These cycles began with sugar. As already mentioned, sugar, the production of which directly depended on the slave trade, was even more firmly established in the 16th century. The beginning of the use of tea, coffee and chocolate in the 18th century only raised the fashion for sugar even more. Due to the consumption of sugar in caffeine drinks and with purified alcohol, this product began to play an important indirect role, contributing to the suppression of the lower classes and women of all classes with a culture of dominion. Drug slavery is a rather forgotten metaphor, but in the case of sugar, it became terribly real.

When the tea market collapsed, the distribution system established and used by the British East India Company turned to the production and sale of opium and the exploitation of the Chinese population, which, in fact, was not related to this colonial system. The invention of morphine (1803), and then heroin brings us to the beginning of the 20th century. Alarmed social reformers who tried to legalize drug use succeeded only in driving them underground. There it remains today, but today it is not controlled by robbery master corporations operating with the silent consent of the public, but by international criminal organizations, often looking like intelligence services. This, as William Burroughs noted, is “a very unattractive picture.” Since the beginning of the era of the study of psychoactive substances,potions and herbal products were becoming increasingly important factors in the equations of international diplomacy. The distant tropics and their indigenous people in this world no longer had to languish from boredom, remaining inaccessible to the predatory eye of the white man: they became a production area with recruited labor — where they expect raw materials from — and a potential market for finished products. Like the Menadas, distraught in a whirlwind of Dionysian fury, the sugar-poisoned economy of Europe, the economy of the dominion style, longed to devour their own children.they have become a sphere of production with recruited labor – from where they are waiting for the supply of raw materials – and a potential market for finished products. Like the Menadas, distraught in a whirlwind of Dionysian fury, the sugar-poisoned economy of Europe, the economy of the dominion style, longed to devour their own children.they have become a sphere of production with recruited labor – from where they are waiting for the supply of raw materials – and a potential market for finished products. Like the Menadas, distraught in a whirlwind of Dionysian fury, the sugar-poisoned economy of Europe, the economy of the dominion style, longed to devour their own children.

The 11th-century Persian scientist Avicenna, who died from an overdose of opium in 1037 (this was the first death case noted in history), was one of the first to write about coffee, although coffee was used before in Ethiopia and Arabia — countries where coffee is found in wild form. On the Arabian Peninsula, it has long been known that coffee is a plant with remarkable properties. There is even an apocryphal story about how the Prophet visited the Archangel Gabriel (Gabriel) and offered him coffee as a healing tool. The great Danish naturalist Linnaeus, who started a modern scientific taxonomy, due to the association of coffee with the Arabs, called this plant Coffea arabica.

When coffee was first brought to Europe, it was used both as a food product and as a therapeutic agent; grains rich in butter were ground to powder and mixed with fat. Later, ground coffee was mixed into the wine and brewed to get what was supposed to be a stimulating and strong refreshing drink. Pure coffee as a drink was not brewed in Europe until about 1100, and it was only in the 13th century that the modern practice of roasting beans began in Syria.

Although coffee is a plant of the Old World – and was consumed in some circles long before tea, nevertheless, it was tea that prepared the way for the popularity of coffee. The stimulating property made caffeine and theobromine – a close relative of caffeine in tea – ideal drugs for the industrial revolution: they provided a boost of energy, allowing people to continue the tedious monotonous work that requires concentration. The tea and coffee break is the only narcotic ritual that has never been prosecuted by those who profit from the state of the modern industry. Nevertheless, it is firmly established that coffee causes addiction, gastric ulcer, can worsen heart condition, cause irritability and insomnia, and in excessive doses even tremor and convulsions.

There were also detractors of coffee, but they always remained in the minority. Many blamed him for the death of French Minister Colbert, who died of stomach cancer. Goethe sinned at his usual coffee with milk as the cause of his chronic melancholy and anxiety attacks. Coffee was also blamed for the fact that, according to Levin, it caused “a state of extreme cerebral agitation, which begins to manifest itself in noticeable talkativeness, sometimes accompanied by an accelerated association of ideas. In a cafe, you can sometimes see politicians pouring a cup of black coffee and a cup of inspiration from this abuse of “deep wisdom” about all the events on earth. ”

In the propensity to extreme riot after drinking coffee clearly lies the reason for some decrees against this product, issued in Europe in 1511. Prince Waldeck was the initiator of the first version of the drug-informing program, when he offered a reward of 10 thalers to anyone who would report to the authorities about coffee drinkers. Even the servants were rewarded if they reported about their masters praising their coffee. However, in 1777, the authorities of continental Europe recognized the suitability of coffee for use by the “pillars of the society of dominion” – by the clergy and the aristocracy. The punishment for drinking coffee by members of less privileged classes was, as a rule, public beating with a cane followed by a fine.

And of course, many people once suspected coffee that it causes impotence.

It has often been argued that drinking coffee reduces sexual excitability and causes infertility. Although it is just fables, in former times they believed in it. Olearius states in the story of his travels that the Persians drink the “hot, black water of Chawae”, the property of which is “to sterilize men and destroy the desires of the flesh”. One sultan so carried away coffee that he began to get tired of his wife. The latter once saw how the stallion was castrated and stated that it would be better to give this animal coffee, then it would be in the same condition as her husband. The princess Elizabeth of Charlotte Orleans, the mother of the dissolute regent Philip II, wrote to her sister: “Protestant priests do not need coffee as much as clergymen are not allowed to marry, and they have to remain chaste … I am surprised that so many people like coffee, although he is bitter and he has a bad taste. In my opinion, its taste is exactly like unclean breath. ”

Research doctor Rauwolf from Augsburg, who later discovered the first tranquilizer, the plant extract “rauwolfia,” found that coffee was long established and widely sold in Asia Minor and Persia when he visited this area in the mid-1570s. Messages similar to those of Rauwolf soon made coffee a kind of “fad”. Coffee was brought to Paris in 1643, and after 30 years in the city there were already over 250 coffee shops. In the years immediately preceding the French Revolution, there were already almost 2,000 coffee houses. If indefatigable chatter is the mother of revolution, then coffee and coffee houses are her midwife.

The importation of chocolate into Europe is almost the very tail of the fashion for caffeine stimulation that began during the industrial revolution. Chocolate made from ground beans of the Theobroma cacao tree growing on the Amazon contains / only small amounts of caffeine, but is rich in caffeine-related theobromine. Substances related to both are endogenously found in normal human metabolism. Like caffeine, theobromine is a stimulant, and the potential for addiction in chocolate is very significant.

Cocoa trees were brought to central Mexico from the tropics of South America many centuries before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. There they played an important sacramental role as a sacrament in the Mayan and Aztec religion. Maya also used cocoa beans as money equivalent. They say that the Aztec leader Montezuma was seriously committed to ground cocoa: he drank his chocolate unsweetened in an infusion of cold water. A mixture of ground chocolate and mushrooms containing psilocybin served the guests at the coronation celebrations of Montezuma II in 1502.

Cortés was informed about the existence of cocoa by his beloved, nee American dona Marina, who was referred to him as one of the nineteen young women proposed by Montezuma as a tribute. Convinced by dona Marina, that cocoa is a strong aphrodisiac, Cortes was eager to start cultivating this plant. He wrote to Emperor Charles V: “On the lands of one enterprise, 2,000 trees were traveled; their fruits are almond-like and are sold ground into powder. ”

Shortly thereafter, chocolate was introduced to Spain, where it soon became extremely popular. Nevertheless, the spread of chocolate was slow, perhaps because several stimulants competed at once in capturing the attention of European countries. In Italy and the Benelux countries, chocolate did not appear until 1606, in France and England it appeared only at the beginning of the second half of the seventeenth century. Excluding the brief period of the reign of Frederick II, when chocolate drink became a favorite tool for professional poisoners who added poison to chocolate, its popularity steadily increased along with an increase in production.

Incredibly, but for a relatively short period (two centuries) four stimulator? – sugar, tea, coffee and chocolate – were able to turn from local goods into the subject of trade of the largest trading empires protected by military forces, the most significant ever known until that time and supported by the newly introduced practice of slave bonded labor. Such is the action of “a cup that invigorates, but does not intoxicate.”

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 in behavior associated with an extremely high level of addiction, which shortens life and burdens society with medical and financial concerns. Nevertheless, the general position regarding these plants can hardly be different. Opium is illegal in most of our world. Poppy pockets, a source of raw opium, are strictly controlled by photo satellite satellites, and each year the plans for opium production in the world are carefully studied by governments to calculate what share of the budget is allocated for treatment of addiction, external efforts to eradicate and internal banning products of refined opium, such as morphine and heroin.

Tobacco, on the other hand, is probably the most widely used plant drug on the globe. No people recognized tobacco smoking as illegal, and indeed, any country that tried to do this would be in conflict with one of the most powerful international drug concern that ever existed. However, the indisputable fact that tobacco smoking is the cause of the premature death of millions of people: lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease are closely linked to smoking. Tobacco also causes addiction no less than heroin, revered by the most powerful drug. When this fact was declared by the leading US surgeon Everett Coop, a whole storm of ridicule and humiliation struck him, raised by leading American tobacco companies and countless number of their consumer adherents.

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 nevertheless, one is closely interwoven with our life style and given to us as very courageous, refined, pleasant, while the other is outlawed, severely persecuted, considered suicidal and perceived with the thoughtless horror with which the previous generations looked at the Bolsheviks, suffragist women and oral sex.

This situation is another example of the hypocrisy of the culture of dominion, how it selects and advances those truths and realities that it finds convenient. But the fact is that although heroin greatly contributes to addiction, and one of the preferred routes of administration is intravenous injection – it carries with it the possibility of spreading serious diseases, nevertheless it is no more dangerous than its legal and heavily proposed competitor tobacco. “Entire volumes of research … lead to the conclusion that the consumption of heroin does not cause any organic diseases. It is a physically harmless, albeit strongly addictive substance. ”

The difference in the public perception of these two plant-based drugs, which now cover the entire planet with a pandemic, cannot in any way contribute to a reasonable social assessment of their harmfulness. With the right approach, the attitude towards these two plants would be similar. However, we are forced to point out some points that are not related to the common property of tobacco and heroin to cause addiction, in order to understand why the society of dominion chose to “crush” one and elevate the other.

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. Smoking may have been known in the Old World during the Neolithic period. Here the opinions of scientists are divided. However, there is no evidence that tobacco smoking was a practice known to any of the historical civilizations of the Old World before Columbus brought it after its second trip to both Americas. After less than a hundred years, packs of tobacco were left lying on the graves of shamans in Lapland! This gives some insight into how quickly tobacco could spread like a smoke, even in a society that was not at all familiar with it before. By the beginning of the XIX century, tobacco consumption in Europe was considered the prerogative of men. The prosperity of men was judged by the quantity and quality of cigars they smoked.Tobacco was ranked among the long list of male privileges of the style of dominion, which included almost all types of alcohol (ladies brandy, please), financial control, access to prostitutes and control of political power (remember the very “smoke-filled rooms”).

Even in the current atmosphere, a clear idea of ​​drugs does not see any contradiction between the passionate calls for the prohibition of drug use by professional athletes and the figure of the chewing tobacco of the main attacking team, stepping towards the emblem of the power, whose eyes are frozen in narcotic tension. Would exclusion of drugs from sports mean the disappearance of this ridiculous figure of a blunt stuffed animal with a good feeding paw? I’m somehow not sure about this.

While tobacco was making its way to the present heights, opium was also popular, albeit insignificant in comparison with tobacco. Ladanum – opium tincture in alcohol – was used as a remedy for colic in children, as a “female tonic”, as a remedy for dysentery and, most significant, as a causative agent of creative imagination among writers, travelers and other bohemians. Morphine, which is to be administered by injection, was the first synthesized alkaloid. This event, which occurred in 1805, cast a shadow on the quiet little world of incense enthusiasts – for however much creative inspiration Coleridge and De Quincy received from their supposed “opiomania” slavery, their dependence on opium, although serious, could be compared with cocaine addiction and new synthetic heroin analogues,then it seems just insignificant.

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 a blade or simply scratched with a fingernail, then a milk will soon appear, like latex, which, when thickened, turns into a dark brown substance. This material is raw opium. Like the psilocybin fungus growing on cattle litter, ergot growing on rye and other cereals, opium poppy – the main psychoactive plant – developed in close proximity to the source of human food. In the case of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), the psychoactivity and nutritional value of the same plant are two sides of the same coin.

Opium – in one form or another – was at the doctors in service at least since 1600 BC. er One of the Egyptian medical guides of the time prescribed it as a sedative for children – exactly as the Victorian nannies did, giving the children the Godfrey flavored drink with opium to soothe them. Opium — this black sticky gum — was not smoked for most of its history, but dissolved in wine and drank or rolled into a ball and swallowed. Opium as a remedy for pain, for euphoria and, according to widespread rumors, an aphrodisiac, was known in Eurasia a few thousand years ago.

During the decline of the Minoan civilization, which dates back thousands of years, and its religion of the Archaic cult of the Great Mother, the original source of the connection of plant nature to the Goddess was eventually replaced by opium intoxication. Early Minoan texts indicate that the poppy was widely cultivated in Crete and Pylos in the Late Minian era; According to these texts, poppy heads were used as ideograms on payment labels. The indicated quantities of the poppy crop are so large that for some time it was assumed that these numbers refer to the grain, and not to the poppy. This is easy to understand, since Demeter was a goddess of both.

As far as knowledge about poppy was transferred to the Greek mysteries of Demeter on the mainland, in fact, it remains to be seen, especially from those considerations that there is a certain iconographic confusion between the poppy flower and the pomegranate, a plant also associated with the mysteries. Kareni quotes Theocritus.

For the Greeks, Demeter was still the poppy goddess, Holding a sheaf and a poppy in her hands.

The famous illustration from Erich Neumann’s book “The Great Mother” depicts a Goddess next to a hive, holding poppy boxes and ears in her left hand, and her right hand resting on one of the undecorated columns that were central to the Minoan religion of the land (ill. 20). It has rarely happened that so many elements of the Archaic technology of ecstasy so obviously come together. This image is an almost pure allegory of the transformation of the Minoan shamanic spirituality in its late phase. Its mushroom roots symbolize the non-conic column; they are the touchstone of the Goddess, addressed to the promises of poppy and ergotized grain. The beehive introduces the theme of honey, the archetypal image of ecstasy, female sexuality and protection, alternating botanical identities and sacred sacraments.

Poppy and latex opium were known to the ancient Egyptians and are manifested in their funerary art, as well as in the earliest medical papyrus. Different types of poppy were known to Persians; in ancient Greece and other places, the poppy was known as the “tribuler”.

Theophrastus knew him as a means of causing sleep, in 300 BC. e., and his observations repeated Pliny in the I century AD. e., adding thoughts of opium poisoning. The Greeks dedicated the poppy to the goddess of the night Nike, Morpheus – the son of Hypnos and the god of dreams, and Thanatos – the god of death. They brought together all his properties in the deities to which he was offered as an offering. Opium spread throughout the Islamic world after the VII century. It was undoubtedly used to treat dysentery, as well as to alleviate mental anguish.

Although the property of opium to cause addiction was mentioned by Heraclides of Tarent in the III century BC. Oe., it was something that even doctors could not understand for almost 2000 years. We, who grew up with the notion of addiction as a disease, may find it hard to believe that chemical dependence on opiates was neither noted nor described by medical authorities until the beginning of the 17th century. In 1613, Samuel Pürchez remarked about opium that “once consuming it, you will have to continue it on pain of death, although some find a way out, resorting to wine instead”. “Understanding that opium causes addiction is rarely found in that period.”

For the ancient world, opium was a means of bringing sleep and relief of pain. In the last days of the Roman Empire, opium was prescribed, perhaps, excessively. Then, opium consumption almost stopped in Europe for many centuries; Old herbalists from Saxon England mention juice, which is driven from poppies as a remedy for headaches and insomnia, but opium undoubtedly played a rather minor role in the healing equipment of medieval Europe does not contain any signs or special marks for opium. although it contains such notes for hundreds of other substances and materials / Martin Rouland’s Alchemical Lexicon , published in 1612, mentions only the word “ozor” (osoror) as a synonym for opium, and without explanation.

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, a medical reformer and medicine man, defended opium and used it on a large scale. And here again, as in the case of purified alcohol, we meet with an alchemist, busy searching for the spirit, locked, as it seemed, in matter, who discovered the means to release the power contained in a simple plant. And just like Llull before him, Paracelsus assumed that he had discovered a universal panacea: “I own a secret means, which I call“ incense ”and which surpasses all other heroic means.”

Soon after Paracelsus began to proclaim the virtues of opium, the doctors belonging to his school began the preparation of a medicinal panacea, whose exceptional active basis was the abundant amount of opium contained in them. One of these enthusiastic followers, the alchemist van Helmont , became widely known as “Dr. Opius,” the first “trupak,” or