alcohol as the active ingredient. He decided instead to base his drink around cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine-rich extracts of cola nut – hence Coca-Cola.6 One of the early marketing campaigns for Coca-Cola advertised it as a cure for ‘slowness of thought’. Nowadays, of course, Coca-Cola and many other carbonated soft drinks use caffeine rather than cocaine to deliver the slight buzz and thereby hook the user. We shall take a closer look at caffeine in chapter 11.
At the end of his global tour of recreational drugs, Mordecai Cooke concluded that an appetite for chemically induced pleasure was a universal characteristic of humans. This appetite could be satisfied in many different ways, ranging from the poisonous toadstools of arctic Siberia to the coca leaves of the Andes, but the underlying motivation was the same. Cooke was in no doubt that if the British had not become so used to their tobacco and gin, they would be using some other drug instead. He therefore felt it was narrow-minded and hypocritical of them to condemn the Chinese for indulging in opium, or the Hindus and Arabs for using cannabis.
Humanity’s relationship with recreational drugs started long before the brief span of recent history that we have just skated over. People were inhaling, drinking and chewing mind-altering substances long before they invented how to write about them. Archaeological evidence suggests that betel nuts were being chewed in Asia nine thousand years ago, tobacco was being used in South America eight thousand years ago and the inhabitants of modern-day Ecuador were taking coca at least five thousand years ago. Opium consumption in Spain has been traced back to around 4200 BC.
Alcohol has an impressively long pedigree. A tavern is mentioned in the world’s oldest recorded story. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than three thousand years ago, contains references to a tavern presided over by a wise old goddess. The story also features a prostitute, reminding us that commercial sex is indeed the oldest profession. The Egyptians were drinking wine and beer six thousand years ago, and there is evidence that wine was being made in the region of modern-day Armenia eight thousand years ago, long before the wheel was invented. Some historians contend that opium has been around even longer than alcohol. Either way, alcohol has been the most pervasive recreational drug, possibly because it can be made from such a wide variety of naturally occurring ingredients.
We humans have probably been using recreational drugs for almost as long as our species has lived on the planet. And the simple reason is that they make us feel better. Early humans used recreational drugs because they produced pleasure and eased pain. But might there be some additional factors in play, over and above pleasure and the alleviation of pain, which reinforced this ancient relationship?
According to one theory, the near-universal consumption of alcohol in northern Europe over the past few thousand years owes something to the scarcity of clean drinking water until relatively recently in history. Most urban-dwellers have had ready access to supplies of clean drinking water only since the nineteenth century. Before then, water was often filthy, sewage-polluted stuff. Alcoholic beverages were usually safer to drink. On top of that, they offered pleasurable intoxication and were a useful source of calories and nutrients. It is no wonder, then, that men, women and children drank alcohol morning, noon and night. Many of the people who built European civilisation were permanently tipsy. The advent of public supplies of clean drinking water in the nineteenth century removed this rationale and coincided with a moral backlash against alcohol. In the Orient, the problem of dirty drinking water had an alternative solution in the form of tea and other herbal infusions. Boiling rather than fermentation rendered their water safe to drink.
Alcohol may not be the only recreational drug that offers potential benefits in addition to pleasure. According to a theory proposed by the anthropologists Roger Sullivan and Edward Hagen, we are naturally predisposed to take psychoactive drugs because doing so helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce in a harsh world. Stimulants such as nicotine, coca and betel nut helped early humans to endure pain, discomfort and hunger, as they still do in some parts of the world. Sullivan and Hagen further argued that drugs were valuable sources of scarce nutrients. Coca leaves, for example, are rich in vitamins and minerals; chewing them may have made a real difference to people living permanently on the edge of malnutrition. A hundred grams of coca leaves can supply the daily recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of calcium, iron, phosphorus, riboflavin, vitamin A and vitamin E, as well as significant quantities of protein and carbohydrate. That said, there seems little prospect of coca becoming the new health snack.
Whatever practical benefits alcohol, coca and other drugs might bring, their big attraction is, and always has been, their psychoactive effects. Self-evidently, we humans enjoy getting out of it from time to time, with the help of whatever psychoactive substance is to hand. That substance might be opium, coca, or hallucinogenic toadstools. If you lived in northern Europe, it was usually alcohol. In his history of wine, Hugh Johnson acknowledges that ‘it was not the subtle bouquet of wine, or a lingering aftertaste of violets and raspberries, that first caught the attention of our ancestors. It was, I’m afraid, its effect.’ The nineteenth-century French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was of a similar opinion:
All men, even those it is customary to call savages, have been so tormented by this craving for strong drinks, that they have always managed to obtain them, however limited the extent of their knowledge. They have turned the milk of their domestic animals sour, or extracted juice from various fruits and roots which they suspected of containing the elements of fermentation; and wherever human society has existed, we find that men were provided with strong liquors, which they used at their feasts, sacrifices, marriages, or funerals, in short on all occasions of merry-making or solemnity.
The particular connection between intoxication and public festivities to which Brillat-Savarin alludes has equally deep roots. For thousands of years, people have used alcohol and other intoxicating drugs for religious or ritualistic reasons and to help them celebrate.
The ancient relationship between ritual and drugs is exemplified by the Eleusinian Mysteries. These culturally important ceremonies were held in Greece for almost two thousand years, from around 1500 BC until AD 400. Thousands of people attended the periodic celebrations at a temple in Eleusis, west of Athens, in which the participants drank from a sacramental cup holding a drink called kykeon. Contemporary accounts make it clear that kykeon contained a hallucinogenic substance, which historians and scientists have concluded was probably ergot.7 Whatever the active ingredients were, the resulting intoxication was a crucial part of the ceremony. Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato and several Roman emperors were among those who took part in what Homer described as a blissful experience.
Intoxication was such a central element in life that most ancient civilisations had their own gods of intoxication. The Egyptians had Hathor the wine god, who took the form of a bull. The ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, had Dionysus the god of drunkenness and celebration. At the time of Plato and Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, the rites of Dionysus were the most widely practised of all religious ceremonies. The celebrations lasted for days and involved drinking large amounts of wine. The Romans enthusiastically embraced the cult of Dionysus, whom they also referred to as Bacchus. The rites known as Bacchanalia became so scandalous that in 186 BC the Senate banned them. They continued nonetheless. It is very hard to prevent people from seeking pleasure.
What these ceremonies and religious rituals had in common, aside from great fun, was an underlying belief that drug-induced intoxication was a mystical state which enabled humans to experience a glimpse of the divine and commune with the gods. Drunkenness and other forms of intoxication were regarded as a form of ecstasy, in which the soul became partly separated from the body. This belief in the spiritual and mystical aspects of intoxication fell away with the emergence of Christianity and Islam, which taught that intoxication was inimical to true spirituality and must therefore
