One state that no recreational drug is capable of producing by itself is happiness, as distinct from pleasure. We will return to the relationship between pleasure and happiness in chapter 8.
Recent history: the last few thousand years
Most of what we know about humanity’s consumption of recreational drugs is confined to the relatively recent past, spanning a mere few thousand years of history. Opium was used by people living in southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) more than five thousand years ago. The language of that region, Sumerian, denoted the opium poppy as ‘the plant of joy’. Opium was even more familiar to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, who took it orally and rectally as a sedative and to alleviate pain. The Greeks were aware of opium’s potential to create addiction, and in the fifth century BC the great physician Hippocrates was criticised for giving too much of it to his patients. Homer’s Odyssey, written in the seventh or eighth century BC, refers to a potion called nepenthe (literally, ‘one that chases away sorrow’) which Helen of Troy used to banish grief. Historians believe that nepenthe was probably made by dissolving opium in alcohol.
Imperial Rome was a hotbed of opium consumption. The emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who ruled during the second century AD, was a regular user. According to the physician Galen, the emperor habitually started his day with a portion of opium the size of a bean, dissolved in warm wine. A census carried out in the city of Rome in AD 312 catalogued 793 separate retail outlets from which opium could be bought. Between them, these opium shops generated 15 per cent of all tax revenues – one of countless examples of the age-old relationship between recreational drugs and lucrative taxation.
Cannabis, or hemp, was cultivated in China six thousand years ago and was being consumed in Egypt and Greece more than three thousand years ago. The women of Thebes in ancient Egypt were famous for making a hemp-based potion which rivalled nepenthe in its ability to banish sorrow. Cannabis may also have been the pharmacological secret behind the Oracle of Delphi, which was probably established in the eighth century BC. The priestess who presided over the Oracle would sit over a hole in the ground, from which wafted the miraculous fumes that enabled her to deliver her prophecies. Some historians believe that these inspirational fumes were generated by burning a narcotic herb, probably hemp. In the fifth century BC the historian Herodotus recorded the recreational use of cannabis by the Scythian people, who lived on the northern shores of the Black Sea:
There is a plant growing in their country called cannabis, which closely resembles flax.… The Scythians take cannabis seeds, crawl in under the felt blankets, and throw the seeds on to the glowing stones. The seeds then emit dense smoke and fumes, much more than any vapour-bath in Greece. The Scythians shriek with delight at the fumes.
Cannabis was used by the Romans, both recreationally and as a medicine. Galen describes how it was customary in the Roman world to give hemp seed to guests at banquets, to promote ‘hilarity and enjoyment’.
The use of cannabis in Britain is of more recent vintage. Even so, it can be traced back several centuries. Hemp was listed in The English Physitian, a medical text written in 1652 by the botanist and physician Nicholas Culpeper, where it appears among a dizzying array of exotically-named plants including Clowns Woundwort, Stinking Gladwin, Rupture-wort, Spleen-wort, Melancholy-thistle, Bastard Rhubarb, Blites, Loosestrife and (my favourite) Arsesmart. Hemp was widely used as a remedy for aches and pains. In his 1653 tome The Complete Herbal, Culpeper wrote:
The seed of Hemp consumes wind, and by too much use thereof disperses it so much that it dries up the natural seed for procreation; yet, being boiled in milk and taken, helps such as have a hot dry cough.… The emulsion or decoction of the seed eases the cholic, and allays the troublesome humours in the bowels, and stays bleeding at the mouth, nose or other places … It is held very good to kill the worms in men or beasts; and the juice dropped into the ears kills worms in them; and draws forth earwigs, or other living creatures gotten into them.
As far as I know, there have been no recent criminal prosecutions in Britain for using cannabis to dislodge unwelcome earwigs from ears.
Cannabis was probably being used as a recreational drug when Shakespeare was writing, and he may have made cryptic references to it in his work. In Sonnet 76 he refers to ‘a noted weed’ and ‘compounds strange’ in the context of aiding his own creativity:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
Some Shakespearian scholars suspect this to be a veiled reference to cannabis. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scientists discovered possible chemical residues of cannabis in the remnants of seventeenth-century clay pipes that were recovered from the site of Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon. There were also firm traces of nicotine and cocaine. Whilst this discovery does not prove that Shakespeare himself took these drugs, it does at least confirm that they were being used in England at that time. European settlers took the practice of using cannabis with them to America, where George Washington later grew it for his own medicinal use. Cannabis was widely used in Victorian England for medicinal purposes. Queen Victoria herself took tincture of cannabis to relieve her royal period pains.
The nineteenth century witnessed a rapid expansion in the variety of psychoactive drugs available and in the social attitudes towards them. The international opium trade was hugely profitable and imperial Britain was at the heart of it. Britain fought two naval wars with China to defend its economic interests by enforcing the lucrative trade in exporting its Indian-produced opium to that country. When the Chinese tried to stop Britain from trafficking the opium, the British enforced it through military might, fighting and winning the First Opium War of 1839–42 and the Second Opium War of 1856–58. The second war resulted in the complete legalisation of the opium trade. By then, British opium exports to China were worth more than China earned from exporting tea and silk.
The use of opium in China at this time was widespread. The Chinese emperor himself is said to have used the drug and many Chinese government officials were regular opium-smokers. According to contemporary accounts, the proportion of people who smoked opium in certain parts of the country ranged between a quarter and half the population. An Englishman who had worked in China for many years during this period commented that when it came to the morality of selling and consuming opium, he could see little difference from alcohol. Both drugs were harmful if taken to excess, but they did little damage if used moderately. The only difference he had noticed was that the opium-smoker ‘was not so violent, so maudlin or so disgusting as the drunkard’.
Morphine was first produced in 1805, when a German chemist extracted it from opium. Commercial production began in the 1820s. The drug is named after the Roman god Morpheus, who was the god of dreams. Morphine was originally taken by mouth. However, the development of the hypodermic syringe fostered a fashion for injecting it, which produced a bigger rush. The American Civil War, in which intravenous morphine was widely used as a battlefield analgesic, created large numbers of morphine addicts. The stable of opiate drugs further expanded in 1898, when the German pharmaceutical company Bayer synthesised diacetylmorphine, a derivative of morphine. They named it heroin, after the Latin for hero, because of its potent psychological
