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 the first and most immediate payment for the discovery of the New World — On November 2, 1492, less than a month after his first arrival in the New World, Columbus landed on the north coast of Cuba. Admiral Okeansky sent two members of his crew loaded with gifts to the interior of the island, where, he believed, was supposed to be the head of many coastal villages that he had seen. The admiral, no doubt, still had some hope that his people would return with the news of gold, precious stones, precious woods and spices — the wealth of India. Instead, the scouts returned with a message about men and women,in which burned rolled leaves were inserted into the nostrils. These lighted convolutions were called“Tobaccos” and they consisted of dried herbs wrapped in a large dry leaf. They were lit from one end, and people were drawing in smoke from the other – they “drank” it, that is, they breathed in something completely unknown in Europe.

De las Casas, Bishop of Chiapsky, who published the report of Columbus in which this description is given, added his comment.

I know the Spaniards imitating this custom, and when I reprimanded them for this wild occupation, they replied that they could not give up this habit. Although the mariners were extremely surprised by this strange savage custom, they, having experimented with it themselves, soon got so much pleasure that they began to imitate him.

Four years after the first journey, the recluse Romano Pane, whom Columbus left in Haiti after completing his second trip to the New World, described in his journal a local habit of inhaling tobacco smoke using a bird-bone device inserted into the nose and supported above the tobacco piled on coals. The consequences of this simple ethnographic observation were yet to be taken into account. It introduced into Europe an extremely effective method of introducing drugs into the human body, including many potentially dangerous ones. It made a worldwide tobacco smoking epidemic possible. It was a fast and abusive way to consume both opium and hashish. And it was the distant ancestor of crack cocaine smokers and Pi-Pi-Pi [ PCP, phenylcycledine. – Approx. ed. ]. He, it should be said, allows one to experience the deepest ecstasy caused by indole hallucinogens, a rare but incomparable practice of smoking DMT (dimethyltryptamine).

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 Caribbean cultural area, so far there have been no confirmed reports of any other smoking materials besides tobacco.

The high culture of the Mayan Indians, which flourished in Mesoamerica until the mid-800s, had a long and complex relationship with tobacco and its habit of smoking. The classic Mayan tobacco was the tobacco Nicotiana rustica, which is still in use among the indigenous populations of South America to this day. This species is much stronger, potentially chemically hallucinogenic in contrast to the commercial varieties available today, Nicotiana tabacum. The difference between this tobacco and cigarette is very large. Wild tobacco was dried and rolled up into cigars, which were then smoked. The trance-like state that followed as a result of smoking, in part because of synergy with the compounds present, including MAO inhibitors, was central to Mayan shamanism. Recently introduced antidepressants, MAO inhibitors are distant synthetic relatives of these natural compounds. Francis Robishek wrote a lot about the fascination of the Maya people with tobacco and its chemically complex composition.

It should also be recognized that nicotine is in no way the only bioactive substance in a tobacco leaf. Recently, the harmala group alkaloids — garman and norgarman — were isolated from commercially produced tobacco and their smoke. They make up the chemical group of beta-carbolines, which include harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine, and six-methoxygarmine, all with hallucinogenic properties. Although so far none of the natural varieties of tobacco have been tested for the presence of these substances, it is reasonable to assume that their content can vary widely depending on the type and development of tobacco and that some of the local types of tobacco may contain relatively high concentrations.

Tobacco was and is always an appendage of more powerful plants and visual hallucinogens, wherever they are consumed in both Americas in the traditional and shamanic form.

And one of the traditional ways of using tobacco includes an enema invented in the New World. Peter Furst studied the role of enemas and klysters in Mesoamerican medicine and shamanism.

Only today it turned out that the ancient Maya, like the ancient Peruvians, used enemas. Syringes, or narcotic enemas, and even enema rituals, reflected in the art of Maya, are found. An outstanding example is a large painted vase, dated to 600–800 AD. O., which depicts a man inserting an enema, and a woman who helps him. As a result of this newly discovered image, archaeologist M.-D. Coe was able to identify a strange object that holds the jaguar deity on another painted Mayan vessel, like a syringe. If the enemas of the ancient Maya consisted, like those of the Peruvian Indians, of intoxicating or hallucinogenic substances, then they may have consisted of fermented balche, a honey drink. Balche – a sacred drink that was made stronger with the help of an admixture of tobacco or bindweed seeds. Thus, it was possible that they took dope extracts and even hallucinogenic mushrooms. Of course, they could use and just tobacco impurities.

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, was preceded by the fashion for tonic “Vin de Mariani”, and heroin was offered as a treatment for addiction to morphine. In order not to be disgusted with the Mayan “enema” rituals, one should take into account that in 1661 the Danish doctor Thomas Bartholin recommended enemas to his patients not only from tobacco juice, but also from tobacco smoke.

Anyone who accidentally swallowed tobacco can witness its laxative effect. This property is used in tobacco enemas used in enemas. My dear brother Erasmus showed me this method. The smoke from two pipes (filled with tobacco) is blown into the intestines. Suitable for this tool came up with an ingenious Englishman.

Not conceding to a clever Englishman, a French doctor of the 18th century, Buco began to defend the use of “intravaginal injection of tobacco smoke for the treatment of hysteria.”

Quite apart from these eccentric and strange uses of tobacco consumption and despite the disapproval of the clergy, the habit of smoking quickly spread in Europe.

Any means in the process of its introduction into a new cultural environment is glorified as a “love affair,” which is obviously the most effective of all advertising tricks. Such different substances as heroin and cocaine, LSD and MDMA, all of them at some stage were offered as a means of providing a certain sense of intimacy – sexual or psychological. Tobacco was no exception: the reason for its rapid spread was in part the sailors’ trailing bikes about its remarkable properties as an aphrodisiac.

The sailors talked about Nicaraguan women who smoked this potion and found such ardor that they would not see in their sleep. Probably, it was these rumors that became the decisive argument in favor of the popularity of smoking among women in Europe. Perhaps this is the reason for the success of the former Franciscan monk Andre Teve, who in 1579 presented tobacco to the French court.

Teve was well aware that tobacco would be smoked and consumed as a means of restoring strength and invigoration. Earlier, the French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nico, experimented with shredded leaves of tobacco, using them as a snuff

mixture for the treatment of migraine. In 1560, Niko handed over a sample of his smelling mixture to Catherine de Medici, who suffered from chronic migraine. The queen was delighted with the action of this plant, and it quickly became known as “Herba Medicea”, or “Herba Catherinea”. Niko’s snuff was obtained from the more toxic Nicotiana rustica, the classic Mayan shaman tobacco. Nicotiana tabacum monk Teve conquered Europe in the form of cigarettes and was a plant that became the basis for an extremely important tobacco economy, which grew in the colonial New World.

AGAINST TOBACCO

Not everyone welcomed the appearance of tobacco. Pope Urban VII threatened to excommunicate anyone who smoked or snuff tobacco in the temples of Spain. In 1650, Innocent X prohibited the snuffing of tobacco at St. Peter’s Basilica under threat of weaning. The Protestants also condemned the new habit and were directed in their efforts no less as the king of England James I, whose fiery “Protest against tobacco” appeared in 1604.

And good compatriots, let us (I ask you) consider what honor or prudence can inspire us to imitate slave Indians, especially in such a disgusting and fetid custom … Without shame, I will tell you why we should humiliate ourselves like that, being like these rude Indians, the slaves of the Spaniards, the dregs of the world, also alien to the Covenant of God? Why don’t we then imitate them in walking in the nude? .. And why should we not deny God and worship the Devil, like them.

By launching this rhetorical “protest,” in which you can see the first application for the “just say no” approach, the king turned his attention to other things. Eight years later, the report said that in the city of London alone there were at least 7,000 tobacco merchants and as many tobacco shops! Smoking and snuffing tobacco came with the intensity of modern fashion.

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 that were fully capable of taking part in the emerging trade economy. In fact, this economy mostly rested on tobacco from the colonies in North America, purified alcohol and raw sugar from the tropics outposts. The Age of Enlightenment was firmly grounded in a drug-based economy.

The introduction of tobacco to Europe was accompanied by an amazing process: due to the emphasis on recreational potential and the large-scale cultivation of the less toxic of the two main types – Nicotiana tabacum, tobacco lost its importance as a shaman plant and hallucinogenic nature of the action. This was more than a matter of changing the standard dose and method of administration. Natural tobacco, which I have tried, being among the various peoples of the Amazon, is very disturbed orientation and was subtoxic. He clearly had the ability to cause altered states of consciousness. The tobacco use habit that arose in Europe was purely secular and aimed at “invigoration”, and therefore the mildest types were considered to be commercially beneficial.

As soon as any specific remedy is found, it often goes through a testing process — dilution, dilution — before reaching the most desirable level of action for all. The transition from eating opium or hashish to smoking these substances, as well as switching from large doses of LSD in the 1960s to the current practice of taking small (for rest and recuperation), was just such a process. This latter transition could have been the result of a small, but constantly present, percentage of people suffering from serious nervous disorders after consuming large doses of LSD. The idea of ​​the “correct” dose of a substance is something that a culture creates over time. (There are, of course, completely opposite examples:the shift from inhaling sprayed cocaine through the nose to smoking crack cocaine is an example of a shift towards larger doses and more dangerous methods of consumption).

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 smoking opium. Until that time, smoking opium was not known. So the prohibition of one drug inevitably leads to a transition to another. By 1793, both opium and tobacco were already habitually smoked throughout China.

In 1729, the Chinese strictly forbade the import and sale of opium. Despite this, the import of opium by the Portuguese from the plantations in Goa continued to grow until, by 1830, more than 25,000 boxes of opium were smuggled into China. England, with its financial interests, for which the threat of these bans was tangible, turned the situation around so much that it turned it into the so-called opium wars (1838-1842).

The East India Company and the British government justified the opium trade with the polite hypocrisy that the British establishment has become a talk of the town for three centuries. There was no direct connection between the opium trade and the East India Company, which, of course, had a monopoly in the British tea trade until 1834, did not exist. Opium was auctioned at Calcutta. After that, the company refused any responsibility for this drug.

The incident that triggered an episode of capitalist terrorism and real drug slavery on a massive scale was the destruction by the Chinese authorities of twenty thousand opium crates. In 1838, Emperor Dao Guan sent official envoy Lin to Canton to end the illicit trade in this drug. Official orders were issued to British and Chinese opium dealers to remove their goods, but these orders were rejected. Then the envoy Lin burned Chinese warehouses on land and British ships awaiting unloading at the port. More annual stock of opium soared up in smoke; The chroniclers who witnessed this event recalled that the fragrance was incomparable.

A rather boring controversy dragged on, but in the end in 1840 a war was declared. The British took the initiative, confident in the strength and superiority of the Royal Navy. The Chinese had no chance: the war was short and decisive. In 1840, Kusan was captured, and the following year the British bombarded and destroyed the fortifications on the Canton River. Local Chinese commander Ji Shen, who replaced Lin’s envoy, agreed to surrender Hong Kong and pay a contribution of 6 million Chinese silver dollars worth about 300 thousand pounds sterling. When this news reached Beijing, the emperor had no choice but to agree. Thus, the Chinese suffered significant losses in money and geographically.

Fifteen years later, a second war broke out. This war also ended badly for China. Soon after, the Treaty of Tianjin legalized opium trade in China.

In many ways, this incident has become a model for larger forays into the international drug trade by the governments of the 20th century. He clearly showed: the potential suitability for the sale of new drugs can be overcome by those established forces that oppose or seem to oppose a new product. and will overcome them. The scheme, created by the English opium diplomacy of the XIX century, was repeated, albeit with some new touches in the CIA secret collusion regarding the international trade in heroin and cocaine in our time.

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 aesthetic forms and style of European thought. In a sense, European society was awakening from narcissistic employment with a revival of classicism and turned out to be like a spectator at a temptingly metaphysical and aesthetically exotic banquet held by the Ottoman Great Turk, a banquet whose main aperitif was opium vision.

In this regard, it is impossible not to mention here about Thomas De Quincey. Like Timothy Leary in the 1960s, De Quincey was perfectly able to convey the visionary action of what he experienced. For De Quincy, it was an action in a poppy maze. He knew how to convey opium vision with that subtle melancholy that is typical of the Romantic era. Almost carelessly, as they say, “one-handed” he created in his “Confessions of one Englishman – opium consumer” a cultural image, “Zeitgeist” (spirit of the times – him) experiences of opium intoxication and a kind of metaphysics of opium. He invented the form of “drug confession” – the most important genre of subsequent narcotic literature. His descriptions of the world’s perception of opium are unsurpassed.

Many years ago, when I was looking through the “Antiquities of Rome” by Piranesi, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing nearby, described to me a series of illustrations by this artist, called “Dreams” by him and transmitting an image of his visions during feverish delirium. Some of them (I am writing only from the memory of Mr. Coleridge’s story) represented huge Gothic halls, where various machines and mechanisms, wheels, cables, blocks, levers, catapults, etc., stood on the floor — an expression of tremendous exerted power and resistance to be overcome. Sneaking along the walls, you notice the stairs, and on it, feeling for yourself a way up, Piranesi himself. Follow a little further up the steps, and you will see how they lead to a sudden, abrupt cliff, without any balustrades, not giving any further step to the one who reached the edge except deep down. Whatever happens to poor Piranesi, do you thinkat least here his labors must somehow be completed. But raise your gaze, and you will see a second flight of steps, even higher, on which Piranesi is again visible, this time standing on the very edge of the abyss. Look again, and you will see another airborne flight of steps; and again poor Piranesi, engaged in his inspired labor; and so on – until the unfinished steps and Piranesi are lost in the darkness at the top of the hall. With the same force of endless growth and self-reproduction, my constructions developed in dreams.and so on – until the unfinished steps and Piranesi are lost in the darkness at the top of the hall. With the same force of endless growth and self-reproduction, my constructions developed in dreams.and so on – until the unfinished steps and Piranesi are lost in the darkness at the top of the hall. With the same force of endless growth and self-reproduction, my constructions developed in dreams.

Opium cheers the spirit; he can evoke infinitely unfolding ribbons of thoughts and ecstatically enthusiastic speculations, and for half a century after De Quincey ‘s “Confessions” , serious attempts were made to use the effect of opium on creative abilities, especially on literary creativity. De Quincey made this attempt; he was the first writer who consciously studied through personal experience the method of forming dreams and visions – how opium helps shape them and how they are strengthened, how they are then rearranged and used in conscious art (he himself – in “passionate prose”, but this process will be applicable in poetry). He learned his waking writing technique, partly from observing how the mind works in dreams and dreams under the influence of opium.

He was convinced that “opium” dreams and dreams themselves can be a creative process, analogous to and leading to literary creativity. He used these dreams in his literary work not as some kind of decoration or allegory, not intently creating an atmosphere, somehow anticipating the plot or helping him, not even as a hint at some ultimate reality (although he considered them as such), but as an art form by itself. His study of the work of imagination in the creation of dreams was carried out with the same concentration as some of his contemporaries devoted to the waking imagination for the creation of poetry.

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 they sought to study, marks the beginning of a not entirely successful attempt by science to achieve some kind of agreement with these materials. In their work, they meant that intoxication, apparently, can imitate insanity – a serious hint that insanity and, in general, most mental illnesses are rooted in physical causes. Opium dreams were viewed as a kind of theater of imagination in wakefulness. And in this fascination with dreams there is a certain anticipation of the psychoanalytic methods of Freud and Jung; this fascination is felt in all the literature of the 19th century — among Goethe, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Huysmans, and Heine. This is the song of the unconscious sirens, which has not sounded since the time of the destruction of Eleusis,but expressed in Romanticism and among the Pre-Raphaelites as a pagan riot, often driven by appeal to opium. Minxes with a modestly downcast gaze from the series of Beardsley drawings or the more sombre labyrinth visions of Odilon Redon or Dante Gabriel Rosetti are the personification of this aesthetics.

As that aesthetics had a darker side, poppy chemistry began to produce more dangerous and potent derivatives in terms of addiction. A hypodermic syringe was invented in 1853, and since then opiate users have had a warning example of intravenous consuming morphine, severe addiction, an example that is sufficient to temper their addiction.

The XIX century was experiencing the selection and classification of an amazing variety of new means and stimulants, which brought two centuries of research and exploitation of vast lands. Tobacco consumption (in one form or another) has become widespread, especially among men, in all classes of society. Opium was abused less, but nevertheless it was a great many people, also from all walks of life. Distilled alcohol was produced and consumed in much larger quantities than ever before. In such a situation, the sober society emerged, and modern positions on the issue of drugs began to take shape. But the present abuse of synthetic substances and its result were still ahead – in the twentieth century.

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 him a name derived from the name of the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. This success in isolating the essence of opium poppy and inspired chemists to attempt to isolate pure compounds from other tried and tested pharmacology products. Means to relieve heart disease were obtained from digitalis. Quinine was extracted from quinine wood and, purified, used in colonies to fight malaria. And from the leaves of a single South American shrub, a new and promising local anesthetic, cocaine, was extracted.

Morphine consumption was limited and sporadic until the middle of the 19th century. At first, outside of medicine, it was used mainly by suicides, but this period was short and morphine soon established itself as a new and very unusual kind of drug. In 1853, Alexander Wood invented a hypodermic needle. Before his invention, doctors used hollow stalks of lilac to inject substances into the body. The syringe appeared just in time – to be used to introduce morphine to soldiers wounded in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. This created a certain pattern, with the manifestation of which we will meet again in the history of opiates – war as a factor in addiction.

By 1890, the use of morphine on the battlefield led to a significant increase in the number of drug addicts in Europe and the USA. Among the veterans of the Civil War who returned home, there were so many morphineists unwillingly that the yellow press began to talk about morphine addiction as a “soldier’s illness”.

Purified alcohol and white sugar preceded morphine as addictive samples of high-purity compounds, but morphine became an example of modern “strong agents”, that is, injected with high-addiction drug injections. At first, such substances were extracted from opiates, but very soon cocaine joined their list. Heroin, created as a treatment for morphine addiction, after its introduction, quickly replaced morphine as a synthetic opiate, preferred among addicts. Heroin retained this status throughout the 20th century.

Heroin and in the public’s imagination quickly supplanted all other means, as for the devilry of drug addiction. And although statistics show that alcohol kills 10 times more often than heroin, addiction to heroin is still today regarded as the very bottom of a narcotic defect. There are two reasons for this point of view.

One of them is the real power of addiction caused by heroin. The passionate attraction to heroin and the illegal or violent acts that this attraction may cause, have created the heroin reputation of a drug whose adherents are ready to kill for it. Adherents of tobacco, too, could kill for their dose, if need be, but instead, they just run in the morning to buy a pack of cigarettes.

Another reason for disliking heroin devotees is the characteristic features of the intoxication they cause. Immediately after the injection man is cheerful, full of enthusiasm. However, this active reaction to the injection soon gives way to “drowsiness”, or “nodding”. The goal of a drug addict with every introduction of junk [Under American jangling, junk refers to the general name of opium and / or its derivatives, including all synthetic from demerol to palphium, this “nap”, to fall into a detached state of drowsiness in which many opiate dreams can unfold. In this state, there is no pain, no regret, no despair, no fear. Heroin is a perfect remedy for anyone who suffers from a lack of self-esteem or is injured by something. This means for battlefields, concentration camps, wards of cancer patients and ghettos. It is a means of resigned and bloomingclearly dying and victims, not located to fight or not able to fight.

Junk is the perfect product … an absolute product. There is no need for trade negotiations. The customer will crawl along the gutter and beg for a purchase … A junk dealer does not sell his goods to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his goods. It humiliates and simplifies the client. He pays his serving junk.

Junk corresponds to the basic formula of the “evil” virus: the Algebra of Needs . The face of evil is always the face of total need. A drug addict is a person who has a total need for drugs. With frequent repetition, the need to become infinite, over it lost control. Using the terms of total need, we ask : “Would you not become?” Yes, they would. You would lie, cheat, report on your friends, steal, do anything , just to satisfy the total need. Because you would be in a state of total illness, total obsession and would not have had the opportunity to act in any other way. Addicts are sick people who cannot tread in a different way. A mad dog has no choice – it bites.

Like heroin, cocaine is a modern drug of high purity, isolated from a plant with a long history of traditional consumption. For millennia, the inhabitants of the mountainous wet forests of South America have stored cultural values ​​that contribute to the ritual and religious consumption of food and stimulant – coca.

The locals in the areas where coca has traditionally been cultivated and consumed will certainly tell you: “Coca no es un droga ,, es comida” (“Coca is not a drug, it is food”). And pretty much it is. Self-consumed doses of ground coca contain a significant percentage of the daily required vitamins and minerals. Coca is also a powerful appetite suppressant. It is impossible to appreciate the importance of these factors without understanding the situation regarding the presence of proteins in the forests of the Amazon and in the highlands of the Andes. An occasional traveler may suggest that the lush vegetation of the rainforest means an abundance of fruits, edible seeds and roots. However, it is not. The competition for available protein resources is so cruel among the thousands of species of life in the jungle flora and fauna that almost all usable organic materials are actually already embedded in the interconnection of living systems. And a plant that suppresses appetite will help a person to penetrate such an environment.

Of course, appetite suppression is just one characteristic feature of coca consumption. Another characteristic is stimulation. The tropical rainforest environment is a difficult habitat. Collecting food and building shelter often requires transporting large quantities of material over considerable distances. And often machete is the only tool suitable for somehow breaking through impassable thickets.

For the culture of the ancient Incas in Peru, and later for the local population and the colonists-metises, coca was a goddess, a kind of echo in the New World of the white goddess Graves Levkotei. It is significant that the goddess Mama Coca in the form of a girl offering a saving coca branch to the Spanish conqueror is embossed on the front list of the classic “History of coca – the divine Inca plant” by W. Golden Mortimer.

Cocaine was first isolated in 1859. Pharmacology was undergoing a kind of renaissance, and cocaine research continued for several more decades. At this stage of our discussion, it is probably hardly necessary to mention that cocaine was initially praised as an excellent remedy against morphine. The young Sigmund Freud was also among the medical researchers attracted by the new tool.

Today it is impossible to say with certainty to what extent coca can increase a person’s psychic abilities. I get the impression that its long-term consumption can lead to a lasting improvement if the inhibitions manifested before it were taken were the result of only physical causes or exhaustion. Of course, the immediate effect of a dose of coca cannot be compared with the effect of morphine injection; but, on the other hand, there is no danger of general harm to the body, as in the case of chronic consumption of morphine.

Freud’s discoveries, which he subsequently refused, were neither too widely known nor well accepted in the circles where they were known. But already his Viennese follower Karl Koller took a further step in the medical use of cocaine – opened the possibility of its use as a local anesthetic. Koller’s discovery made a real revolution in surgery; in 1885, this property of cocaine was hailed as a terrific medical breakthrough. However, with the widespread use of this drug, its effect as an addictive stimulant was also noted. Cocaine was an inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson, who describes in his story “The Strange History of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” some means that causes a sudden personality change. A fact that has contributed to the rapidly growing reputation of cocaine as a dangerous new vice for the rich and libertines.